Trump sweeps Nevada Republican caucus in race with no major challengers
Submitted by admin on Thu, 02/08/2024 - 9:29pm
Former President Donald Trump easily won Nevada’s Republican caucus Thursday in a race where he was functionally the only remaining major candidate on the ballot, according to early returns from several rural counties.
The Silver State win would secure 26 delegates for Trump, his largest single delegate haul thus far, and a third electoral victory heading into a Republican primary in South Carolina later this month that could seal the 2024 Republican nomination for the former president.
Ryan Binkley, a Texas banking CEO and pastor, was the only other active candidate on the caucus ballot. Early returns showed him with less than 3 percent of the vote. Four additional candidates — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — filed to participate in the caucus last October but ended their campaigns well before Thursday’s contest.
Trump’s Nevada win follows victories in Iowa — where he beat second-place Ron DeSantis by nearly 30 points — and New Hampshire, where he bested former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley by about 11 percentage points. Hours before Nevada’s caucus Thursday, Trump also won a caucus in the U.S. Virgin Islands by 48 points.
It also comes after another de facto Trump win Tuesday, after “none of these candidates” trounced Haley in Nevada’s nonbinding Republican primary by a 2-1 margin. Of the original Republican field, only three major candidates — Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) — filed to run in the primary, but Pence and Scott also ended their campaigns early. The state Republican Party adopted rules prohibiting candidates from running in both contests, with delegates only allocated to caucus participants.
The Trump campaign seized on the result this week, saying in a statement that Haley’s defeat was “humiliating, embarrassing and utterly overwhelming.” The result also provided cover for the campaign, which had begun to worry internally that Nevada’s caucus result could prove hollow if turnout dipped too low, according to a report from Axios.
Read more: ‘The Trump train is a-comin’’: Nevada Republicans descend on GOP caucus sites
One week, two elections
This week’s bifurcated Republican contests — primary and caucus — are the end result of a monthslong dispute between a Nevada GOP determined to hold a traditional caucus and a 2021 state law creating presidential preference primaries for both major parties.
Under that 2021 law — passed under unified Democratic control of state government — a state-run primary would be held so long as at least two candidates filed. It was a prelude to a move by the Democratic National Committee to bump Nevada up its nominating calendar, a move opposed at the time by Republicans.
The Nevada Republican Party sued the state to stop the primary in May 2023, roughly four months before it would finalize the decision to hold the caucus. In July, a state judge ruled that both a primary and a caucus could move forward. Republicans and the state eventually agreed to drop the suit in January.
But the state GOP has pitched its caucus as a way to reject many of the Democratic-backed election policy reforms adopted since 2020, including universal mail ballots. Under party rules, the caucus required in-person voting barring select exceptions, and pledged to use paper ballots, voter ID and a ban on super PAC participation in the caucus process.
However, Republicans critical of Trump have criticized Nevada’s caucus rules as designed to benefit the former president. The super PAC ban in particular was derided by DeSantis’ super PAC, Nevada Back Down, as having “rigged” the process. Haley, who avoided Nevada outright, called the process a “scam” and “rigged from the start.”
Also scrutinized: the myriad ties between state party leadership and the Trump campaign.
Four party leaders — Chair Michael McDonald, Vice Chair Jim Hindle, National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid and Clark County Party Chair Jesse Law — were among six individuals indicted last year for their alleged role in the “fake elector” scheme designed to keep Trump in power after losing the 2020 election.
A report from The New York Times last year found the Trump campaign continued to court McDonald ahead of the rules-making process for the caucus, including hosting him at his Mar-A-Lago club. The state party’s former executive director, Alida Benson, has since become the Trump campaign’s Nevada director.
And in December, McDonald told a crowd at a Reno Trump rally: “You come out to your location, you walk in with your neighbors, you sit with your neighbors and tell them how great it is. And then you cast your ballot for Donald Trump.”
— This story is used with permission of The Nevada Independent. Go here for updates to this and other Nevada Independent stories.
