Bespectacled and unassuming, Reid bears a resemblance to former U.S. Rep. Wayne Owens, with whom he shares many of the same politics.

Declared an "enviromental champion" by the League of Conservation Voters, his adamant opposition to nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain has been a thorn in the side of the Utah delegation, which wants Yucca Mountain as the alternative to storing the waste on Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County.

Reid uses the same arguments for keeping the waste out of Nevada that Utah officials use for keeping the waste out of the Beehive State — a point Reid has made repeatedly to Utah's elected officials to no avail.

"I am dumbfounded why the governor is not fighting with us," Reid told the Deseret Morning News in 2002. "We fought (alongside Utah) against Skull Valley. And I don't know why the two senators of the state are not helping us."

Reid's rags-to-power rise has been well documented. He was born in 1939 in the tiny Nevada mining town of Searchlight, where his father was a hard-rock miner. He lived in a small cabin without indoor plumbing, and he attended a two-room elementary school.

Since Searchlight had no high school, Harry boarded with local families in Henderson while he attended Basic High School. He later married his high school sweetheart, Landra Gould, with whom he had five children, all of whom attended Brigham Young University.

With the financial aid of families in Henderson, Reid later earned an associate's degree in science from Southern Utah State College (now Southern Utah University) and then a bachelor of science degree from Utah State University.

He then went to law school at George Washington University, working nights as a police officer on Capitol Hill.

After a term in the Nevada state assembly, he became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history at age 30. He lost his first bid for the Senate in 1974, but in 1983 was elected to the first of two terms in the U.S. House.

He was elected to the Senate in 1986. He won a fourth term Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote and even prominent Nevada Republicans campaigned on his behalf. Among his supporters are a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and even the father of the man Reid beat six years ago, who is now Nevada's other senator.

Reid has won respect from Democrats in the Senate for his deft managerial skills and for leading a marathon filibuster this year that awed his colleagues. And Republicans like his integrity.

"His word's good," former Republican Whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma said, as Online News Hour reported. "To me, that's one of the most important things you can say about any senator."