None of it matters, though, as long as he finds a way to finish first on Election Day.

“The only approval rating that counts is the one on Nov. 2, OK?” Reid told POLITICO outside a local community center when asked why he has not been able to turn around his low approval ratings.

It’s called winning ugly, and it’s an approach Reid is at peace with as he seeks a fifth term under the worst imaginable political conditions.

Reid is trying to make the case that the state can’t afford to lose him, citing his power as Senate majority leader and the projects he has delivered throughout the state. Yet, his campaign largely has been focused on the foibles of his GOP opponent — Sharron Angle — and the theme that the tea party favorite holds “dangerous” policy positions.

Angle has been deeply damaged by the relentless attacks but if she can steady her campaign and undermine the notion that she is an extremist candidate, there’s much material for her to work with. At the top of this is the state’s frightening 14.3 percent unemployment rate.

Reid contends that if Angle attacks him on the problems now with the economy, she must also give him his due for the times when the economy was booming in Nevada.

“She’s been in the state a long time — does she give me any credit for the 20 good years we just had?” Reid said in an interview. “If she’s blaming me for what’s wrong now, shouldn’t I get credit for the 20 years I was back there and we did so well?”

Asked about the criticisms that the jobless rate here grew to the nation’s highest as he was leading the Senate, Reid instead compared the job losses under the Bush administration to the growth under President Bill Clinton, saying, “I think she has to go back and study history a little bit.”

An Angle spokesman called Reid’s comments “sad.”

In a campaign swing through the northern part of the state this week, Reid defended his tenure as Senate majority leader during the economic downturn, insisting his career has been focused on creating jobs, whether it’s been efforts to bring tourists to Lake Tahoe to Congress consuming months over a new controversial new health care law, which he said has been a “boon” to the economy.

“My No. 1 concern is jobs in Nevada,” Reid said Monday, accompanied by his wife Landra, who made her first trip to Nevada after sustaining serious injuries in a March car crash.

The persuasiveness of Reid’s appeals remains to be seen in a state where the economic pain is unmistakable, obvious from a simple stroll down the street here, whether it’s empty Reno storefronts or $25-a-night motels.

“He’s brought so much here,” said Jill Derby, a former chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party. “People don’t know that. He’s a quiet, soft-spoken guy, and he’s not in any way charismatic.”

Indeed, the four-term, 70-year-old Reid knows all too well that his skills as a Senate insider outweigh his ability as a retail campaigner. At an event Monday commemorating the opening of a medical research facility at the University of Nevada at Reno, Reid garbled his prepared remarks and jokingly blamed it on his hometown.

“Sometimes the Searchlight grammar gets in my way,” he said.

At times though, it gets him in trouble, providing ammunition to his opponents. His infamous 2007 comment criticizing the Iraq troop surge and calling the war there “lost” continues to haunt him.

On Thursday, as combat troops were leaving Iraq, Reid acknowledged in an interview that the surge “helped,” saying, “We’ll have to see what the long-term effects will be.”

Reid downplayed the idea that his comments on losing the Iraq War would hurt him in the fall.

“Understand I was saying the same thing that General [David] Petraeus was saying,” Reid told POLITICO at a Las Vegas-area Indian reservation where he was touting the development of a new energy project. “General Petraeus said many, many times the war couldn’t be won militarily.”

Last week, Republicans pounced on Reid’s latest gaffe — his remark that he didn’t “know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.” Reid acknowledged in an interview that he may not have spoken “artfully” in making the comment, but said he stuck by his premise.

“The point is this — John McCain, who favored immigration, is now opposed to immigration reform. Jon Kyl, who helped us with immigration reform, is now off the reservation instead of trying to help us with that,” Reid said of the Arizona Republican senators. “The point I was making — maybe not artfully — look at what the Republicans have done. How can anybody support them? Not just Hispanics.”

Reid’s style is especially ill-suited for TV, which further inhibits his appeal to voters. Earlier this week, Reid proved why after he walked into a crowd of supporters at a community center and blurted out exactly what he thought.

When a local TV reporter asked him to respond to a Rasmussen Reports survey that found 65 percent of Americans angry at federal policies, Reid offered a dismissive response to the idea that there was any public frustration over the issue.

“People responding to it have no idea what they’re talking about,” Reid said, trivializing those who answered in the affirmative by claiming they were answering misleading questions conducted by an unreliable pollster. He later cited a number of federal policies that he said benefited Nevadans and created jobs.

Still, the economic downturn has fueled voters’ distaste for Reid, and a recent Mason-Dixon poll found his approval ratings at 40 percent. Fortunately for him, the same poll also found Angle was viewed favorably by just 37 percent of voters.

Reid doesn’t seem too concerned about his anemic approval ratings.

“It’s [happening in] races all over the country — it’s not just me,” Reid when asked why his high-spending campaign hasn’t improved his standing in the eyes of voters.