After weeks of lobbing rhetorical bombs at each other in campaign speeches and advertisements, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican rival Sharron Angle locked horns in a one-off televised duel.

Before the debate got underway, supporters outside the venue chanted slogans including "Angle, Angle, Angle," and "Vote for Harry, not Scary."

Reid, gunning for a fifth six-year term, is fighting for his political life amid deep voter anger at the sour US economy and high unemployment, especially in Nevada, which has the country's top jobless and home foreclosure rates.

Republicans hungry to retake the US Congress have made the soft-spoken political scrapper a top target in the November 2 elections, painting him as a champion of a free-spending Washington deaf to ordinary Americans' worries.

But Reid has clawed back from public opinion polls showing him down by double digits after Angle shocked establishment Republican candidate Sue Lowden in the party's primary, and surveys now show a statistical dead heat.

Angle, a former state assembly member, has defied early predictions she was unelectable and raked in a staggering 14 million dollars in campaign donations over the past three months while surviving a series of verbal gaffes.

Unshackled by a controversial January US Supreme Court decision, conservative political groups funded by wealthy donors have vowed to pour millions into the race, arguably the most high-profile battle of the year.

Angle was expected to use her cash to unleash a flood of television advertisements in the next two weeks.

Reid has reportedly built up his get-out-the-vote machine and has leaned on visits from former president Bill Clinton as well as from Obama to fire up the party's core supporters.

The debate comes after months of long-distance warring with fiercely negative advertising and as each candidate worked to overcome a tendency to make controversial, or at least unfortunate, statements.

"Neither of them wants to say the stupid thing that becomes the defining event of the campaign," according to David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Reid, who drew fire in April 2007 for saying of Iraq that "this war is lost," was recently caught calling Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand the Senate's "hottest" member.

Angle, a fierce foe of abortion, has suggested that a hypothetical teenager raped and impregnated by her father should turn "a lemon situation into lemonade" by considering options other than terminating her pregnancy.

She has said the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to global warming is not "sound" and recently suggested, quite wrongly, that US cities of Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, were falling under strict Islamist "Sharia law."

A key factor in the race is Nevada's grim economy, and an unemployment rate of 14.4 percent that is far higher than the national rate of 9.6 percent.

The struggles of glittering gambling haven Las Vegas even sparked a spat between Obama and Reid, who angrily urged the White House to "lay off Las Vegas" after the president held up spending money there as a waste.

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