Nevada Proves The GOP Is All In On Donald Trump

Nikki Haley's Rejection By The Nevada GOP Was Clear And Categorical.

The political pundits are already beginning to conduct a post-mortem of Nikki Haley’s indisputably failed bid for the Republican Party Presidential nomination. One can easily see why: the arcane dual primary and caucuses systems the Nevada GOP put in place for the 2024 Presidential contest gave Nikki Haley not just one but two resounding defeats by her arch-nemesis, GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

Though the former U.N. ambassador has been seen as a long-shot candidate, she’s benefited from a cash windfall in recent months, spurring hopes she might at least be able to close the gap with Trump in her home state’s primary Feb. 24.

But her loss to a “none of these candidates” option in the Silver State primary has ramped up pressure on the candidate to either drop out soon despite the media and donor attention she’s receiving or risk a potentially humiliating defeat to Trump in her home state and beyond.

Yes, Nikki Haley literally came in second in the Nevada primary to “none of these candidates”—and a very distant second at that. During the Nevada caucuses two nights later—which is where the state’s convention delegates were actually awarded—Donald Trump secured very near to double her vote total in the primary.

While it is somewhat problematic how significant Nevada will be in the general election this fall, Nikki Haley’s double rejection merely solidifies an electoral message that has been coming through loud and clear since the Iowa caucuses last month.

Nikki Haley has no chance of becoming the GOP Presidential Nominee, and for one simple reason: GOP voters overwhelmingly want Donald Trump as their 2024 standard-bearer.

To appreciate the magnitude of Nikki Haley’s defeat in Nevada (and, by extension, the extent of Donald Trump’s victory), we have to first look at the voter results for both the GOP primary on February 6 and the GOP caucuses on February 8.

Because of an arcane restructuring of the nominating process in Nevada, the state held both a primary and a caucus, but only the caucuses were going to allocate the state’s GOP delegates.

The confusion over having two competing contests dates to 2021, when Democrats, who at the time controlled both Nevada's governor's office and the legislature, passed a law changing the presidential nominating contest from long-held caucuses to a state-run primary. 

The Nevada GOP objected, but last year their legal bid to stop the primary from going forward was rejected. In a twist, the judge in the case allowed the state Republicans to hold their own caucuses. No delegates will be at stake in the Republican primary, while all 26 will be up for grabs in the GOP caucus.

The state GOP ruled that candidates who put their name on the state-run primary ballot could not take part in the caucuses. 

Nikki Haley opted to participate in the non-binding primary rather than the binding caucus, while Donald Trump skipped the primary for the caucus. The reported rationale for Haley’s decision was that the Nevada state GOP was “too loyal” to Donald Trump, and so neither Haley nor Mike Pence nor Tim Scott—two former GOP contenders who had long since suspended their campaigns—wanted to be associated with the caucus.

As a result of this decision, Donald Trump was the only major GOP contender appearing on the caucus ticket, thereby ensuring that, no matter the outcome of the primary contest, he had a lock on all 26 Nevada GOP delegates to the convention.

However, the primary also contained a “none of these candidates” option—a compromise of sorts since write-ins were not allowed. Amazingly, Nikki Haley lost resoundingly to the “none of these candidates” option.

Even when we look at the results for the major metropolitan areas within Nevada (Carson City, Churchill County, and Clark County), Nikki Haley came in a distant second to “none of these candidates”.

One reason why this happened is that, while candidates had to choose either the primary or the caucus, voters could vote in both. There are indications that many Trump supporters turned out to vote “none of these candidates” in the primary, and then voted in the caucuses for Trump.

While candidates couldn’t take part in both contests, state law allows registered Republicans to cast ballots in both, opening the door for Trump supporters to cast protest votes against Haley. Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) said last month that he planned to select the “none” option in the primary and then vote for Trump in the caucuses. 

Republican strategist Doug Heye said the “none” win is a boost for Trump. 

“If you’ve got all these candidates listed except Donald Trump, and then you have an option that says ‘not any of these people,’ by default, that’s Trump,” said Heye. 

If there was a sizable Trump-voter contingent voting “none of these candidates” in the primary, then the argument that the “none of these candidates” option is effectively a pro-Trump vote has merit.

While Haley and Trump did not go head to head in either the caucuses or the primary, that Trump won more than 99% of the vote in the caucuses gives a plausible foundation for comparing the primary and caucuses results.

With the caucuses going almost exclusively to Donald Trump, combining the caucus and primary results is a valid means for comparing Trump’s performance vs Haley’s.

Looking at just the vote totals specifically recorded for each candidate, we can see that Donald Trump would have beaten Haley handily in the primary contest had he chosen to participate. If we combine the caucus and primary vote totals, and break out from “none of these candidates” the number of voters who voted for Trump in the caucus, Trump still has more than 50% of the vote.

This approach would give Trump a lower margin of victory than he had in either Iowa or New Hampshire, but still leaves him with a commanding victory.

If we consider the “none of these candidates” vote as entirely a vote for Donald Trump, then Donald Trump fared considerably better, coming away with more than 63% of the vote total.

We have to consider this second possibility, because the RealClearPolitics poll average for Nevada showed Trump commanding 69% of the popular vote in that state.

If we count only the votes Donald Trump explicitly received in the caucuses, then we are left with the conclusion that Donald Trump greatly underperformed his poll numbers, which would the first time that happened in the contests to date.

Another reason for considering “none of these candidates” to be effectively a Trump vote is that, while only two polls go into the RCP polling average, between the earliest poll and the latest poll there is a significant rise in Trump’s popularity.

Alternatively, the scenario could be that Trump voters were especially interested in sending an electoral message to Nikki Haley, and just weren’t worried about the caucus results, as Trump had a lock on those no matter what by being the only major candidate competing in the caucuses.

In either scenario, Donald Trump resoundingly beat Nikki Haley not once but twice: once by proxy in the primary and once directly in the caucuses.

There is one mitigating factor in Nikki Haley’s performance in the Nevada primary: she largely did not even campaign in the state. A major reason for this was that she had accused the Nevada GOP of being “in the bag” for Donald Trump.

Haley on Wednesday charged that "Nevada – it’s such a scam. They were supposed to have a primary. Trump rigged it so the GOP chairman – who’s been indicted – would go and create a caucus."

"We knew that it was rigged from the start," Haley argued in separate interviews with Fox News Digital and with FOX 11 Los Angeles while campaigning in southern California.

As a result, Haley’s campaign made the conscious decision to skip campaigning in Nevada.

While her name was on the ballot, Haley ignored the Nevada primary.

Haley didn't campaign in Nevada ahead of the primary and hasn't been in the state since speaking in late October at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual leadership conference.

"We knew months ago that we weren’t going to spend a day or a dollar in Nevada, because it wasn’t worth it. And so we didn’t even count Nevada. That wasn’t anything we were looking at," Haley emphasized on Wednesday.

Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald has stated this decision shows Nikki Haley is not a serious candidate.

McDonald, responding, claimed that Haley "is not a real serious candidate."

"The fact of the matter is she didn’t show up. She did not campaign in Nevada and neither did ‘none of the above’ and ‘none of the above’ won," the Nevada GOP chair told Fox News Digital.

Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, did not dismiss Nevada and did campaign there, in particular reminding voters to participate in the caucuses and not the primary.

Trump's campaign worked to get the message out to supporters in Nevada that if they want to vote for the former president, they need to show up at the caucuses.

"Your primary vote doesn't mean anything. It's your caucus vote," Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas late last month. "So in your state, you have both the primary and you have a caucus. Don't worry about the primary, just do the caucus thing."

Regardless of what Nikki Haley’s ultimate chances for winning the GOP nomination later this year might be, there is no scenario where the decision to ignore a state completely is going to generate voter enthusiasm for any candidate.

Regardless of how Nikki Haley publicly assesses the Nevada results, they are relevant for one important reason: they remind us yet again that the poll numbers we have seen for Donald Trump throughout this primary season are real. He really does have that much support in virtually every state.

Consequently, Nikki Haley has to take seriously the RCP polling average that shows Donald Trump with a 2-to-1 potential margin of victory in Nikki Haley’s home state of South Carolina.

Even more significant is the poll trend among the three polls which make up the RCP average: Donald Trump’s support has grown with each poll taken.

With the South Carolina primary coming up in two weeks’ time, not only does Nikki Haley have considerable ground to make up in the state which arguably should be her strongest base of support, she has to reverse a support trend that is increasingly pro-Trump.

That is asking a lot of any candidate in just two weeks, especially one which has been beaten by record margins multiple times.

The Michigan primary comes just a few days after South Carolina, and Haley has the same problem—a lack of support.

Even if Nikki Haley picks up every voter who would otherwise vote for Ron DeSantis, she still will lose to Donald Trump by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Yet picking up all Ron DeSantis voters seems unlikely, because the poll trends show Donald Trump’s support in Michigan increasing with each poll taken.

Even if we look at all the polls taken in Michigan, we still have to conclude that Donald Trump has, in all probability, at least 65% support among Michigan GOP voters.

At no point in the run-up to Super Tuesday is Nikki Haley even remotely competitive with Donald Trump.

On a nationwide basis, in recent days Haley’s support has slipped, while Trump’s has increased.

We cannot simply dismiss the polls as “biased” or slanted towards Donald Trump. We cannot because his dominating poll numbers have been replicated in three separate contests by dominating vote totals. In three states, which encompass the East, Midwest, and West, Donald Trump has proven that he is hands down the candidate the GOP voters want as their nominee for the fall election.

Nevada proves that my assessment of the New Hampshire primary was correct: New Hampshire was Nikki Haley’s political graveyard.

Was New Hampshire Nikki Haley's Political Graveyard?

Thus while Nikki Haley got a higher percentage of votes, and lost by a narrower margin than the polls indicated on the eve of the primary, the end result is still the same: Nikki Haley lost, and lost badly. Donald Trump has been in the driver’s seat all along, and that did not change for New Hampshire; this race has been his to lose and remains his to lose.

Nikki Haley has no chance of winning the Republican Party’s nomination for the fall election. Only if some bizarre turn of events removed Donald Trump from the race would any other candidate have any hope of being the party standard-bearer come the fall.

The Nevada results for both the primary and the caucus show us once again that the GOP voters have rejected Nikki Haley, and there is no reason to believe they will not continue to reject Nikki Haley.

Nevada demonstrated once again that, for better or worse, GOP voters are all in on Donald Trump. They have already made up their minds as to whom they want leading them in the fall campaign, and they want Donald Trump. They do not want anyone not named Donald Trump.

Nikki Haley should stop wasting her time and her donors’ money. The GOP can stick a fork in her campaign, because it is well and truly done.