Nevada has spoken and declared a clear winner in the GOP caucus: Donald Trump. No surprise there – his landslide was just as expected as Biden’s in Tuesday’s Democratic Party primary. If anything at all was shocking about the state’s contests, it would be “who” came in second behind Biden – the very same “None of These Candidates” that trounced Nikki Haley – and how that ballot option fared in both parties. If any of the more than a dozen also-rans thought they had even the slimmest glimmer of hope before, the good people of the Silver State have disabused them of such delusion.
No Contest in Nevada
Former President and current front-runner Donald Trump took the GOP’s 26 delegates from Nevada in the February 8 caucus. With 97% of the vote counted as of 5:30 a.m. Eastern, Friday morning, Trump received 59,545 votes – 99.1% of the total – as his sole competitor, Ryan Binkley, got only 536. About the only thing memorable about Binkley in the Silver State race is the fact that he – like all of the also-rans on the Democrat side two days prior – fell far short of defeating the infamous “None of These Candidates” option, which demolished all comers in both parties except Trump and Biden.
Coming in at 89.4% in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, Biden lost 5.6% to the non-candidate. As Liberty Nation Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner put it after the GOP primary, “it’s one thing to lose to Trump – many a successful politician has fallen in his wake. It’s yet another to lose in a landslide to literally nobody, a hypothetical stick figure, and quite another to realize that 60% of Republican voters in Nevada showed up just to vote against you.” The “no thank you” choice didn’t get quite the landslide in the Democratic primary as it did the GOP’s, but it still came as a blow to Marianne Williamson, whose 3,727 vote total was little more than half the 7,026 won by “None of These Candidates.” It came as no surprise then when she ended her campaign on Wednesday. Between the landslide victories of the two presidential heavyweights and the success of “None of These Candidates” on both primary ballots, the people of Nevada sent a clear message to all the challengers: It was always going to be Biden vs Trump – no others need apply.
There’s a Pattern Here
For those of you keeping score at home, there is a clear pattern here. Back in January, Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus by about 30 points (a new record, and by quite a bit, for the state). And while the margin was a much tighter 11% in New Hampshire’s primary, the former president took that race as well. Trump also won the Virgin Islands Republican presidential caucus on Thursday night, taking the territory’s four delegates with 74% of the vote. Nikki Haley came in a distant second with 26%.
Biden – who wasn’t even on New Hampshire’s ballot thanks to his insistence that, contrary to tradition, South Carolina go first – won an impressive write-in campaign. He took 64.8% of the vote to Rep. Dean Phillips’ (D-MN) 19.9%, and he won the Palmetto State in an even greater landslide with 96.2% over Williamson and Phillips.
The next contest is South Carolina’s Republican primary on February 24, then the Michigan primaries for both parties on February 27. Some suggest South Carolina is Nikki Haley’s last chance – if she can’t win her home state, her campaign is doomed. Others would argue it’s dead already and that she simply hasn’t realized it yet. As LN’s Tim Donner theorized, however, it’s quite likely she’s just hanging on in hopes of a conviction for at least one of Trump’s more than 90 felony charges. But for most, there’s no question who will win the coming contests – in either party.
