SALT LAKE CITY -- Democrats can win in Republican-dominated states such as Utah by fighting what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid characterized as GOP corruption in Washington during a stop here on his "red state" tour Wednesday.

Reid, D-Nev., visited Salt Lake City on the tour, which also includes stops in Phoenix, Denver, Pocatello, Idaho, and Omaha, Neb., in an effort to lure rural voters back to the Democratic Party.

He was accompanied in Salt Lake City by U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, Utah's only Democratic member of Congress. The senator said the Democratic Party lost the 2002 presidential election because it didn't campaign hard enough in rural areas.

"The Democrats became convinced that they could win the general election in the last several decades by campaigning in big cities," Reid said.

Reid also took aim at what he called a Republican "culture of corruption" in Washington, citing the indictment of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay on money laundering and conspiracy charges and lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty pleas to charges in a congressional influence-peddling investigation. Republican Party officials, however, noted that Reid accepted $61,000 in contributions from Abramoff's clients, and they demanded Reid return the money.

"It's the height of hypocrisy for Senator Reid to point to this issue when he himself has accepted money from Abramoff's clients," said Tucker Bounds, spokesman for the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C.

Reid said he did nothing wrong by accepting the money. The money was mostly from American Indian tribes for his work in promoting federal programs important to tribes in Nevada.

He said he carefully reviewed the contributions and found nothing amiss. He accused Republicans of trying to share blame in the Abramoff lobbying scandal.

"Jack Abramoff has been a Republican operative for 30 years," Reid says. "He did not give a single penny to a Democrat."

Reid plans to introduce a series of anti-corruption measures next week in Washington. Although he is withholding details, Reid said the proposal would ban all gifts from lobbyists to members of Congress, require monthly reports listing when lobbyists and federal officeholders meet and increase penalties for members of Congress convicted of corruption.

Such measures, he said, would help restore voters' faith in government, and lure voters to the Democratic Party.

He noted that in the 2002 presidential election, several rural states, including Nevada, gave narrow margins of victory to President Bush. He said Democrats can win key congressional seats in those states in 2006, and score victories in the 2008 presidential race, by talking about honesty in government and about rural issues.

Reid angrily denied a report in The Washington Times newspaper Wednesday that said he is one of five congressional lawmakers whose offices are being probed by the Justice Department in connection with the Abramoff investigation. He criticized the paper, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

"You have to really stretch things to call it a newspaper," Reid said.

Reid also raised some eyebrows when he noted a Salt Lake Tribune poll Wednesday that showed 58.6 percent of Utahns approve of how President Bush is handling the war in Iraq, compared with 39 percent nationally.

"It's just backwards from the rest of the country," Reid said. He later clarified his remarks, saying he didn't intend to imply that Utahns are backward in their thinking, but only that the majority of Utahns differ markedly from the rest of the country on the war in Iraq.

Reid tried to allay fears that Utah will become home to a temporary nuclear waste storage facility, proposed for the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City near the Utah Test and Training Range. Private Fuel Storage, a group of utilities, wants to store 44,000 tons of nuclear waste on the site.

But key rail line access to the area was blocked last week when President Bush signed a bill creating the 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area.

Reid took credit for pushing the measure through Congress, and said the proposal is dead in the water.

"It's not going to happen. ... There's no way the American public is going to allow the most poisonous substance known to man to be transported on our railways and highways, past our businesses, our schools, our homes," he said.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B3.