Former President Donald Trump will make his case to Republican voters in Nevada on Sunday as the front-runner for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination looks to solidify support in the state that votes third on the GOP nominating calendar.
Trump’s Sunday afternoon speech in Reno comes on the heels of campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, with a return trip to Iowa planned for Tuesday. The flurry of travel underscores an aggressive effort by Trump’s team to maintain his sizable polling lead a little over a month before the Iowa caucuses open the Republican nomination process.
Trump leads the GOP primary field by around 40 percentage points nationally, according to the latest update to the CNN Poll of Polls. In the new average, Trump holds 61% support to 17% for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and 11% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Ahead of his Nevada trip, Trump on Saturday doubled down on language condemned for its ties to White supremacist rhetoric, saying at a campaign event in New Hampshire that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The former president told the crowd that immigrants “from all over the world” are “pouring into the country,” reiterating a phrase he used previously that sparked outcry from the Anti-Defamation League earlier this year.
Trump on Saturday also quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack President Joe Biden as a “threat to democracy” and praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, two other foreign leaders with totalitarian tendencies.
Trump’s advisers have privately voiced concerns that his supporters could simply assume he has a comfortable advantage in the race and that they are not reliant on their votes.
“We are leading by a lot, but you have to go out and vote,” the former president told…
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