What Nevada Will Mean For November

FILE: Tea Party favorite, Sharron Angle is running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada for a U.S. Senate seat.

Today, voters in 11 states head to the polls for primaries. But the race to watch is in Nevada. Who will win the Republican nomination to oppose Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-N.V.) in November?

In recent weeks, proven conservative Sharron Angle, endorsed by the Nevada Tea Party, the Club for Growth, and prominent conservative leaders, has rocketed ahead of two more well-known, establishment candidates, Danny Tarkanian and former GOP state party chairwoman Sue Lowden.

Angle's candidacy has surged on a campaign built on substantive specifics on tax and spending issues, with a unifying theme of restoring American prosperity.

Embracing Reagan’s supply side economics, she recognizes that restoring booming economic growth requires tax cuts establishing low tax rates, which is what provides the incentives for investment, job creation, entrepreneurship, new business startups, and business expansion.

She recognizes that getting control of long term spending requires fundamental entitlement reforms, such as personal accounts for Social Security and returning the hundreds of remaining federal welfare programs back to the states.

And Angle recognizes that booming economic growth requires reliable supplies of low cost energy from all possible sources, not still more, financially burdensome, corporate welfare subsidies for excessively costly fantasies that will destroy several times more jobs than they create.

She favors repeal of the Obamacare government takeover of health care that Harry Reid shepherded through Congress, unnecessarily establishing and expanding still further entitlement spending burdens that America cannot afford. She favors replacing this Obamacare-government power prescription with patient power reforms such as health savings accounts, and a national, interstate market for health insurance, that will bring costs down through incentives and competition, rather than causing costs to explode through runaway spending.

Angle also has a long established record on pro-family and pro-life issues while serving in the Nevada legislature. All of this has translated into something fundamental neither of the other candidates enjoy: real, surging, grassroots support.

These are the reasons why recent polls show Angle with a double-digit lead over former favorite Lowden, and a lead almost as large over Tarkanian. Angle’s faltering opponents have spread the charge that Reid wants to see Angle get the GOP nod as the easiest opponent for him to beat. But that is exactly what Reagan’s defeated GOP establishment rivals and Jimmy Carter said about him.

I predict Angle’s substantive, grassroots appeal will draw more independent and even Democratic voters to her in the general election.

A win by Angle today would be another big victory for the Tea Party, which is proving to be a Club for Growth on steroids in defeating RINO and liberal Republicans, rather than dividing the Republican vote as was originally feared.

While the liberal establishment media tries to claim that this appears to be an anti-incumbent year, it is turning out actually to be a pro-conservative, anti-liberal year.

Peter Ferrara is Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Senior Policy Advisor on Health Care to the Heartland Institute, and General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush.

Fox Forum is on Twitter. Follow us @fxnopinion.