In Nevada, Biden wins the Democratic primaries; votes are still being counted in a confusing GOP race
Associated pressFebruary 6, 2024
Nevada dueling
Republican
presidential caucuses and primaries this week are causing confusion among voters, and those who cast ballots in the primary election on Tuesday had the option of not supporting either candidate.
Nikki Haley competed in the Republican Party’s primaries on Tuesday, which does not count towards the party nomination, while former President Trump is the only major candidate in Thursday’s Republican caucuses who does. The split races have undermined the third state’s influence on the GOP calendar.
It may also have led to a hokey approach to Tuesday’s election, as the day started with lower-than-expected turnout. In the first two hours after polls opened, officials said, 183 people had voted in person in Washoe County, the state’s second-largest by population. In Clark County, home to Las Vegas and Nevada’s most populous county, 2,298 people voted in person during the same two-hour period. Nevada voters also have the option to vote by mail or before Election Day.
There was also a Democratic primary on Tuesday, which President Biden easily won against writer Marianne Williamson and a few lesser-known challengers. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota was not on the ballot.
Jeff Turner, 65, showed up at the Reno Town Mall with a ballot checked for neither of these candidates, an option that the Nevada Legislature added to all statewide races decades ago, and an option that many Trump supporters have been able to choose since the former president and leader of the Republican party. is not on the primary ballot.
Turner’s favorite candidate, the governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy were also not on the ballot, having opted to participate in Thursday’s caucuses had they remained in the race. Turner is among voters complaining about an increasingly likely rematch between Trump and Biden.
I think it’s my duty, Turner said of voting in elections in which the candidates of his choice are not on the ballot. I think we all have the right to vote, we should vote. And even if it isn’t any of these candidates, it at least shows where I am, and I hope others will see that.
Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina, has dismissed the Nevada caucuses as unfair and rigged by the state party to deliver a victory for the former president. Her campaign opposed the $55,000 fee the Republican Party of Nevada charged candidates for participating in the caucuses.
We haven’t spent a cent or an ounce of energy on Nevada. We decided early on that we would not pay $55,000 to a Trump entity to participate in a trial rigged for Trump, Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney told reporters on Monday. Nevada is not and has not been our focus.
Haley’s campaign has dismissed concerns about how she would fare in the symbolic primary and has instead focused on her home state of South Carolina and the Feb. 24 primary.
Ralph Eastwood, a 64-year-old retired truck driver from Las Vegas, is a Biden supporter who changed his registration to Republican so he could get Haley to vote against Trump in particular.
As stupid as it may seem, she is the anti-Trump, Eastwood said. Who do you really want as president? Someone who has the proven ability to have no real emotional control, who has a long instinct for victimizing people because he can?
Trump, meanwhile, is expected to pick up all 26 of Nevada’s Republican delegates during Thursday’s caucuses. He needs 1,215 delegates to win the party nomination and could reach that number in March.
If your goal is to win the Republican nomination for president, go where the delegates are. And it baffles me that Nikki Haley chose not to run, Trump’s senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in an interview.
Although Biden was in little danger of losing the primaries, he campaigned in the Western state on Sunday and Monday to energize voters ahead of November, when Nevada will be a key swing state.
Speaking Sunday in North Las Vegas, Biden described a potential second Trump presidency as a nightmare.
Trump campaign advisers also see the primaries as an opportunity to test their general election operation.
It’s a national campaign and this is what national campaigns do, LaCivita said. We don’t forget anyone. We take nothing for granted.
The caucuses taking place on Thursday evening are expected to favor Trump. With his strong grassroots support, Trump already has an advantage if caucuses are held instead of primaries. The matches require organizing supporters around a state and urging them to show up in person at an agreed time.
But Nevada’s Republican Party tipped the scales even further, pushing through changes that would prevent super PACs, like the kind DeSantis relied on before he quit, from helping candidates. The Republican Party in Nevada also banned Republicans from participating in the primaries, where they could show support among a larger number of voters, if they wanted to participate in the party-led caucuses.
Nevada’s role in the early states is overlooked during election cycles because of its distance from Washington and the prominence of other early states in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
The state’s longtime locals don’t have the same tradition of playing a decisive role, having only been an early state since 2008, when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a veteran political power broker, gave his home state a spot the top of the state. the presidential primary calendar.
Nevada’s population is on the move, and the state is growing rapidly and attracting people who may not yet be familiar with its relatively emerging role.
But beyond that, the state has been especially neglected this year, with an incumbent president entering the Democratic race, a former president entering the Republican race and his only major challenger largely ignoring the state.
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and former Vice President Mike Pence had also opted to participate in the Nevada primaries before ending their campaigns. Due to the timing of their announcements, their names still appeared as an option on the ballots, along with a quirk under Nevada law that allows voters not to choose either of these candidates.
Nevada lawmakers did not add any of these candidates as an option in all statewide races as a way to get voters involved after Watergate, but expressed dissatisfaction with their choices. No one can win elected office, but it received the most votes in the congressional primaries in 1976 and 1978. It also finished ahead of Republican George H. W. Bush and Democrat Edward M. Kennedy in the 1980 Nevada presidential primaries.
The two processes have been a source of confusion and frustration for voters, said Cari-Ann Burgess, the interim registrar of voters in Washoe County, which includes Reno. For months, her office has been receiving calls from Republican voters with questions, including which election to vote in and why Trump isn’t on the primary ballot they received in the mail. These calls continued on Tuesday.

Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.