Clark County residents encountered rain and overcast conditions Tuesday when they left their homes for the polls to vote in the first Nevada presidential preference primary.
Even though President Joe Biden was a lock to win his primary against a field of long shots, Nevada Democrats seemed motivated to give the incumbent a strong symbolic vote of support. He received 90% of the vote statewide and was declared the winner about two hours after polls closed.
The participation of Democrats in the primary dwarfed that of Republicans, at least judging by the number of mail ballots submitted to election officials through the end of early voting Friday. About 93,000 Democrats had voted in comparison to just 57,000 Republicans in that early voting period, according to the Nevada Secretary of State.
Among the state’s 1.9 million active voters, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by about 35,000.
“If you don’t exercise the right to vote, you lose it,” said Las Vegas resident Ed Cox, a Democrat who cast his ballot Tuesday at the Desert Breeze Community Center in Spring Valley. “It’s not perfect, but this is how you make democracy better. If you don’t vote, you can’t make it better.”
But those voting in Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary won’t have their voice heard in picking a candidate to earn delegates from Nevada for the Republican National Convention July 15-18 in Milwaukee.
That’s because the Nevada Republican Party on Thursday is hosting its independently operated caucuses and using the result to determine its delegates to Milwaukee. State Republican Party rules dictate candidates can’t participate in both the primary and caucuses
Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, was the only remaining major Republican candidate to participate in Tuesday’s GOP primary in Nevada. And it didn't go well — Haley received less votes than "none of these candidates."
Meanwhile former President Donald Trump and long shot contender Ryan Binkley, a Texas businessman, will be on the ballot for Thursday’s Republican caucuses.
Republican voters, however, were eligible to participate in both nominating contests.
Las Vegans Barbara and Michael Baker said while leaving the Desert Breeze Community Center they voted in the Republican primary for “none of these candidates” as a sign of support for Trump.
“We plan on Trump winning this election so we can get our country back,” Barbara Baker said. “I want law and order. I want the (U.S. southern) border shut down.”
Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney said the campaign decided not to pay the $55,000 entry fee to participate in caucuses that were “rigged” for Trump. Rather, Haley has spent recent weeks campaigning in the next GOP nominating contest in her home state of South Carolina, according to the Hill.
“We have not spent a dime nor an ounce of energy on Nevada,” Ankney said.
Other Trump supporters have signaled they will caucus for the former president and vote for “none of these candidates,” in the primary. Among them are Republican notables like Gov. Joe Lombardo and Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony.
The Republican caucuses in 2016 featured 74,878 participants, or about 17% of Nevada’s 437,520 active Republican voters at the time.
But Trump campaign officials aren’t expecting 17% of Republicans to show up on Thursday. They worried voter turnout in the primary would easily surpass that of Thursday’s caucuses, according to a report from Axios.
The concerns of a low turnout at the caucuses come despite Trump rallying here late last month to urge supporters to caucus, instructing them to ditch the primary and to only participate in the caucus.
“Don’t vote (in the primary), that’s two days earlier (than the caucuses),” Trump told the roughly 2,000 attendees at a Las Vegas rally. “Don’t use the mail-in ballots. Don’t do anything. It’s a meaningless event. There are no delegates. It’s a con job.”
Maybe Trump doesn’t have the pull here thinks he has.
Senior advisers to Trump are unhappy with the campaign’s Nevada state director, Alida Benson, after learning that caucus planning was not coming along “as well as they liked,” two sources told Axios.
Those sources also told Axios “when it became clear that Nevada’s GOP and the party in Clark County … were not well-equipped to run the caucuses, the campaign blamed Benson for not activating volunteers and dragging the campaign into a chaotic process.”
The Sun has previously reported that the party has struggled locking down locations for its caucuses. It published a list of caucus sites online, and then had to alter the document when the Clark County School District denied facility requests because the voting event conflicted with after-school activities like sporting events.
As of Tuesday afternoon, CCSD said the party had successfully reserved 36 schools. Churches and community centers also are being utilized for the caucuses. Here's a listing of sites they say will be used.
Ultimately, the Trump campaign brought on Brian Swensen, a onetime aide to former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as Nevada senior adviser, a move that was made because Benson was going on maternity leave, Axios reported.
The Nevada Legislature in 2021 voted to move the nominating process for the presidential elections from caucuses to state-run primary elections, but Republicans have resisted the change. Instead, they got more than they hoped for with chaos in planning and fears of participation shortcomings.
"Donald Trump is trying to divide us, not unite us; drag us back to the past, not lead us to the future," Biden's campaign stated.
“I want to thank the voters of Nevada for sending me and Kamala Harris to the White House four years ago, and for setting us one step further on that same path again tonight. We must organize, mobilize, and vote. Because one day, when we look back, we’ll be able to say, when American democracy was a risk, we saved it — together.”
The noncompetitive races this week won’t be a theme in November. Biden and Trump appear to be on track for a rematch of the 2020 election, where Biden prevailed in Nevada by about 30,000 states.
Nevada has voted for the Democrat in the past four presidential elections dating to 2008 when Barack Obama won his first term as president. But voters in 2022 also picked a Republican in Joe Lombardo for governor to solidify Nevada’s status as a swing state.
Tuesday’s primary elections were solely for presidential contenders, while the June 11 primaries will determine Democrat and Republican candidates for U.S. House, U.S. Senate and the state Legislature. The general election is Nov. 5.
For some people, Tuesday marked the beginning of their tracking of the 2024 election cycle and the angst that comes with the lead-up to the November election.
For others, this year’s elections have the feeling of 2016, when Trump, then a political newcomer, upset Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen this November,” said Chantelle Uzan, a 33-year-old Democratic voter. “The last time Trump was running for office, everybody thought it was a shoe-in that a Democrat would win —and they didn’t. And I think people get too comfortable.”
“If they really want to see change, they need to go out there and they need to mobilize,” she said.
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