“You average out all these bad polls,” Reid said. “Six years ago I never led in a poll, a public poll, never, but I wound up winning by 6 points. And Catherine’s going to win by a nice margin.”

In that 2010 Nevada Senate race, Reid was regularly shown trailing Republican challenger Sharron Angle, and even the exit polls missed the result.

The most likely source of the problem was in oversampling English speakers among the Silver State’s Latino population. Bilingual polling conducted by Latino Decisions showed that 90 percent of Latinos were likely Reid voters, as opposed to the 68 percent in the exit poll.

“The first ad they ran against me? Harry Reid, the best friend illegal immigrants ever had. The Hispanic community didn’t think that was funny. They took it very seriously, and they were outraged that somebody who had been trying over the couple of decades to be involved in the Hispanic community was insulted as they were,” Reid said, describing the opposition attacks in his 2010 race. “They turned out in droves, and it’s only going to get better this time.”

[Fear and Loathing Among Latinos in the 2016 Campaign]