Nevada is doing things differently this election season, and not necessarily for the better.
Former President Donald Trump and his former US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, are competing in Nevada as the last two major candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. But, confusingly, they’ll do so on two separate days — and in two entirely different types of contests.
Haley will appear on the state’s primary ballot on February 6, and Trump will appear on the state’s caucus ballot on February 8. Voters can participate in both contests, but only one really matters: The state Republican Party decided that only the latter will determine who receives the state’s 26 delegates, and any candidate who competes in the primary cannot also compete in the caucuses.
If this seems to make no sense, it’s because it doesn’t. But it’s the unfortunate product of political infighting and a national shift away from caucuses after 2020, and it already appears to be leading to confusion for voters. Trump would have been dominant in Nevada no matter the format — he has a more than 50 percentage point lead on average in national polls. But now he’s assured of winning all of the state’s delegates simply because his only major opponent opted not to participate in the caucuses. And that makes it difficult to learn anything new about the depth of Trump’s support in Nevada from the results.
“I don’t want to say the Nevada caucuses and primary are meaningless at this point, but it’s certainly a foregone conclusion,” said Zachary Moyle, a GOP strategist based in Nevada.
Nevada wanted to move away from caucuses. What happened?
Nevada has historically held caucuses, contests in which voters gather in local meetings run by their state parties to say who they’d prefer to be their presidential nominee. But following bungled Iowa caucuses in 2020 that led to delays in reporting the results, Nevada lawmakers joined a chorus of…
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