Vox - Nevada Republican caucus 2016: news and updateshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2016-02-24T10:40:02-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/108687652016-02-24T10:40:02-05:002016-02-24T10:40:02-05:00Nevada's GOP caucuses were a chaotic mess, in 4 tweets
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<figcaption>Chaos. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Nevada's GOP caucuses were a mess Tuesday night: long lines, loose ballots, voters directed to sites that didn't exist, and volunteers taking ballots while wearing Donald Trump apparel.</p>
<p>Here are some tweets from National Review's Elaina Plott on how chaotic the polls were:</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">New: People registered for precinct 1303 in Sierra Vista showed up to caucus. There was literally no site set up.</p>
— Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) <a href="https://twitter.com/elainaplott/status/702323423901458432">February 24, 2016</a>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Updated quote from source: "40-50 loose ballots on table." Counter looked at them, put them under envelopes. Wouldn't budge when called out.</p>
— Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) <a href="https://twitter.com/elainaplott/status/702326376305528832">February 24, 2016</a>
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<p>Controversy over voter fraud and misconduct at the polls started to brew when people reported that caucus workers were handing out ballots without <a href="http://votesmart.org/elections/voter-registration/NV#.Vs3BlzYzDt9">checking in</a> voters. Nevada does not require photo identification at the polls, but does require voters to sign in when voting.</p>
<p>Some people claimed that in all the disarray, polling volunteers were forgoing anti-fraud measures, like ensuring ballots were properly collected and accounted for. Mashable's Emily Cahn echoed these concerns, tweeting that caucus-goers were able to vote more than once.</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Man here says "it's a disaster." No one is checking in or checking IDs. They're handing out ballots willy nilly. Some guy voted trump twice</p>
— Emily Cahn (@CahnEmily) <a href="https://twitter.com/CahnEmily/status/702303082030366720">February 24, 2016</a>
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<p>Caucus-goers even shared pictures of caucus personnel taking ballots wearing Trump and Rubio merchandise.</p>
<p>The Nevada Republican Party confirmed that <a href="https://twitter.com/NVGOP/status/702336487317069826">it was not against caucus rules</a> for workers to show their support for a particular candidate. While Nevada's polling volunteers are allowed to wear campaign gear (as long as they don't distribute it), it is not allowed in other states like New York and Florida.</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">And another caucus volunteer wearing a Trump shirt taking ballots. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/tcot?src=hash">#tcot</a> <a href="https://t.co/W0HdpqD1jR">pic.twitter.com/W0HdpqD1jR</a></p>
— Drew Ryun (@DrewRyun) <a href="https://twitter.com/DrewRyun/status/702323706547146752">February 24, 2016</a>
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<p>Despite all of the contention and allegations of voter misconduct, the Nevada Republican Party <a href="https://twitter.com/NVGOP/status/702332313061883904">tweeted</a> that it did not receive reports of any irregularities or caucus rule violations Tuesday.</p>
<p>This isn't the first time there's been mayhem at the polls in Nevada, a state that only started holding caucuses in 2008 and has had trouble running them smoothly.</p>
<p>In 2012, the Nevada Republican Party took three days to announce who actually won the caucus after only 33,000 people came to the polls.</p>
<p>This year, several political campaigns confirmed that the state's GOP had not kept a list of 2012 caucus-goers, making it difficult to figure out who was going to come out and vote, according to <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/nevada-caucuses-republicans-219594#ixzz415pmncun">reporting from Politico</a>.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Tuesday — the first time Republicans in the West voted in the presidential election cycle — saw record numbers at the polls. More than 75,000 voters came out, and overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump, who won the caucus in a <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11104592/nevada-2016-republican-results-donald-trump-wins-the-caucuses">blowout</a>. It's not yet clear if the high turnout will save Nevada's status as one of the first states to vote — something that was <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430249/iowa-new-hampshire-rnc-fight-nominating-calendar">already at risk </a>before the problems appeared last night.</p>
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<div class="volume-video" id="volume-placement-3666" data-volume-placement="article" data-analytics-placement="article:middle" data-volume-id="6762" data-volume-uuid="972297329" data-analytics-label="Why aren't all the primaries on the same day? | 6762" data-analytics-action="volume:view:article:middle" data-analytics-viewport="video"></div>
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11105290/nevada-caucus-mess-tweetsTara Golshan2016-02-24T07:51:25-05:002016-02-24T07:51:25-05:00The Republican Party is broken
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<p>Could the Republican Party have stopped <a href="http://www.vox.com/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>?</p>
<p>The theory goes like this: The Republican Party had the chance to off Trump early, but it didn't act quickly enough — and now <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11104592/nevada-2016-republican-results-donald-trump-wins-the-caucuses" target="_blank">it may be too late</a>. <span>If only officials had coalesced around </span><a href="http://www.vox.com/marco-rubio">Marco Rubio</a><span> earlier, if only the Super PACs concentrated their fire on Donald Trump faster, if only </span><a href="http://www.vox.com/jeb-bush">Jeb Bush</a><span> had dropped out before </span><a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11078838/south-carolina-republican-primary-2016-results">South Carolina</a><span>, if only...</span></p>
<p>As Trump's insurgency continues to overwhelm the party, the recriminations are growing more scathing. Political scientist Dan Drezner <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/23/my-very-peculiar-and-speculative-theory-of-why-the-gop-has-not-stopped-donald-trump/">suggests</a> Republicans might have thought it so obvious Trump would lose that they didn't think they had to do anything. "Just how much of Trump’s rise came about because the people who could have stopped him read analyses asserting that he had no chance of winning?" Drezner asks.</p>
<p><span>But the Republican Party did try to stop Trump. It just failed. And until the nature of that failure is appreciated, the strength of Trump's candidacy is going to be underestimated.</span></p>
<h3>The Republican assault on Donald Trump was vast</h3>
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<p>The GOP didn't, in political science parlance, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/9/23/9352273/party-decides-trump-sanders" target="_blank">"decide"</a> on a single champion — no one candidate received the bulk of official endorsements before Iowa. But parties do more than decide; they also veto. And the Republican Party did try to veto Trump — as did everyone else. Trump has come under a coordinated assault from the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the media that is unlike anything in my lifetime.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9113871/first-republican-debate-of-the-2016-presidential-election">first Republican debate</a> featured Fox News — arguably the single most powerful actor in the modern Republican Party — trying to cut Trump's candidacy to shreds. The harsh questioning, which touched on everything from his past heterodoxies to his friendship with <a href="http://www.vox.com/hillary-clinton">Hillary Clinton</a> to his misogyny, kicked off a feud between Fox News and Trump that continues to this day.</p>
<p>The National Review, which acts as the official magazine of American conservatism, pulled contributors from every wing of the movement to write a Stop Trump issue. The <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination">festival of contributions</a> — which included everyone from Glenn Beck to Erick Erickson to Bill Kristol — were clustered under the headline "Conservatives Against Trump." The magazine's own <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-menace">editorial</a> was titled "Against Trump," and it began by calling Trump "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones."</p>
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<p>And there have been plenty of smaller skirmishes. Remember <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-belittles-mccains-war-service-sparking-stern-republican-backlash/2015/07/18/e9f814c6-2d7e-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html">McCain-gate</a>, when the Republican Party tried to use its base's veneration of military heroes to destroy Trump?</p>
<p>This is how parties veto. They send signals. They mobilize their influencers. They use the media. They make sure the party faithful know that <em>this isn't our kind of guy, he doesn't believe what we believe, he isn't the kind of person we support. </em></p>
<p>Republicans know all that. They've heard their party. They've heard everyone else, too — the condemnations of Trump have been a nonstop clamor, a roar that's drowned out all other political coverage. But Republican primary voters just don't give a shit. It's worse than that — they <em>like</em> that Trump pisses off the establishment. The backlash only makes him stronger.</p>
<h3>The realities of an anti-establishment wave</h3>
<p>Everyone says this is an anti-establishment year, but elites are just mouthing the words; they still don't quite believe it. They still think that if only the Republican establishment had been a bit better organized, a bit quicker on the draw, they could have kept control. The truth is probably closer to the opposite.</p>
<p>What would've happened if the party had somehow muscled out Chris Christie and Jeb Bush and John Kasich before New Hampshire — a level of coordination and control unheard of in modern politics — and circled the wagons around Rubio? Would it have helped him or hurt him to look so much like the choice of the establishment?</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Guy in line told me he watched the news last night and saw the endorsements for Rubio/mainstream media pushing him. So won't vote for him.</p>
— David Catanese (@davecatanese) <a href="https://twitter.com/davecatanese/status/702302119005556736">February 24, 2016</a>
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<p>"You can consolidate all day long around whoever," Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican, told me, "but if the people perceive that candidate to be establishment or establishment-lite, they ain’t going to go that way."</p>
<h3>The Republican Party is broken</h3>
<p>The hope now is that Trump is at his ceiling and his continued dominance simply speaks to the fracturing of the field. Some polls show Rubio <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/surprise-trump-falls-behind-cruz-national-nbc-wsj-poll-n520296">beating Trump</a> in a head-to-head matchup, though others show him <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/01/14/poll_trump_leads_rubio_in_hypothetical_one_on_one_matchup.html">losing</a>.</p>
<p>This is the best argument for how the Republican Party could help Rubio — it could somehow force all the other candidates from the race. But would that help Rubio? Or would it anger Republican voters and help Trump, or perhaps even anger some of the spurned candidates and lead to them endorsing Trump?</p>
<p>The party doesn't have any magic powers. All it has is its credibility with its voters. Because, in the end, parties can only influence — it's voters who actually decide. And the Republican Party has, for whatever reason, lost its ability to influence its voters. Donald Trump is winning this thing, and so far, <a href="http://www.vox.com/ted-cruz">Ted Cruz</a>, the only guy elite Republicans hate more than Trump, is vying for second place.</p>
<p>Parties are vehicles for structuring information. Their role is literally to help voters decide by helping them choose whom to trust. The fact that Republican voters seem to prefer candidates whom their party is screaming not to trust reveals a profound failure in the GOP's core role. The Republican Party is broken.</p>
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<h3>Watch: Why Trump is so dangerous</h3>
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https://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11103704/the-republican-party-is-brokenEzra Klein2016-02-24T06:50:03-05:002016-02-24T06:50:03-05:002 winners and 3 losers from the Nevada Republican caucuses
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<figcaption>Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty</figcaption>
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<p>Donald Trump <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11104592/nevada-2016-republican-results-donald-trump-wins-the-caucuses" target="_blank">won the Nevada caucuses in a landslide</a> Tuesday night. Now, the precise delegate count has to be worked out. But in early states, winning or losing one delegate in the final count has less effect on a campaign than having momentum going into the next round of primaries and caucuses — especially when the next round is the multistate "SEC primary" across 11 states (most of them Southern) on March 1.</p>
<p>And for non-candidates, being associated with a winning (or losing) campaign — or, say, mucking up yet another caucus — can have effects that last beyond the final vote tally. So even in a race with only five active Republican candidates, there's still more than one winner and more than one loser — and some of the winners and losers weren't running at all. Read on.</p>
<h3>Winner: Donald Trump</h3>
<p>When it comes to delegates, this won't be Trump's biggest victory — he'll net more from South Carolina, a bigger state that allots delegates winner-take-all style rather than proportionally.</p>
<p>But it might very well be his most significant win yet. A mere three weeks ago, during the Iowa caucuses, Trump placed a disappointing second — barely ahead of Marco Rubio, and far behind his polling numbers. The culprit, some believed, was that Trump hadn't bothered to invest in a get-out-the-vote operation in the same way Ted Cruz and Rubio had.</p>
<p>But then he won the New Hampshire primary, he stomped the competition in South Carolina — and when it was time for a second caucus in a state where Ted Cruz hadn't camped out for a year, he won, and he won big. Trump is only getting stronger. He is only getting harder to beat. He is not quite the presumptive Republican nominee yet, but he is getting there.</p>
<h3>Winner: Democrats</h3>
<p>As the Democratic primary appears to be speeding toward a conclusion, the longer the Republican primary is in chaos — especially Trump-led chaos — the better it is for Democrats. Because even though Trump won Nevada easily, Republican elites aren't just going to lie down and accept him as the nominee — they'll fight. Yet none of Trump's rivals won a convincing enough second place to seriously narrow the field. Chaos continues. Democrats rejoice.</p>
<h3>Loser: Marco Rubio</h3>
<p>Here's the thing about running for president: At some point, you actually have to win an election.</p>
<p>If you game out the rest of the Republican race, Rubio is still the only non-Trump Republican with a plausible path to victory. But that path relies on him actually making up his delegate gap with Trump at some point — which is to say, winning states. And his team <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428823/marco-rubio-nevada-caucuses-ted-cruz">had previously argued</a> that Nevada was a good opportunity for him.</p>
<p>Rubio's campaign has done a tremendous job of persuading the press that they have everything under control. But the size of Trump's victory will change that. At a certain point, a 3-5-2-2 record in the primaries stops looking like a strategy and starts looking like just another record of defeat at the hands of Trump.</p>
<h3>Loser: Nevada Republicans</h3>
<p>The Nevada Republican Party cannot have nice things. In 2012, it managed the humiliating one-two punch of getting only 33,000 people to turn out to caucus and still<em> </em>taking three days to determine who had won. In 2016, it did better on both of those counts, but there were <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/disarray-nevada-caucuses-219702">widespread reports</a> of irregularities and incompetence in caucus administration.</p>
<p>The Nevada legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, had the chance to switch to a primary like a normal state. It did not. So the state party is responsible for this ramshackle process.</p>
<p>And there may well be consequences. GOP Chair Reince Priebus has been making noises about switching up the early primary states for 2020 and beyond, and it looks like the most likely casualty is Nevada. That's good news for other states in the region with "stable party infrastructures to go with their similarly diverse populations," in the not-too-subtle words of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430249/iowa-new-hampshire-rnc-fight-nominating-calendar">National Review's Tim Alberta</a>. But it's bad news for the Silver State, which probably sealed its own fate on Tuesday.</p>
<h3>Loser: land rights activists</h3>
<p>Say what you will about the Bundys. Between the 2014 standoff at patriarch Cliven Bundy's Nevada ranch and the 2016 occupation of an Oregon parks building led by Ammon Bundy, the Nevada-based family of land rights activists managed to bring the issue of Western land ownership and grazing rights to the attention of the national conservative movement. From there, they had the opportunity to become recognized as an interest group within the conservative coalition. They were even being <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/23/ted-cruz-nevada-anti-federal-land-control-ad-oregon-militia-standoff-bundy">actively courted by Ted Cruz</a>.</p>
<p>But Cruz came in third. Instead, the activists' best-chance state to influence the Republican primaries went to the race's most enthusiastic supporter of government taking private lands — Donald Trump. Land rights activists might have proved they're a movement, but they haven't yet proved they're a constituency.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11104630/2-winners-3-losers-nevada-republican-caucusesDara Lind2016-02-24T05:39:49-05:002016-02-24T05:39:49-05:00Donald Trump just won Nevada in a blowout
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<p>Donald Trump has won Tuesday's Nevada caucuses in a blowout. The billionaire won about 46 percent<strong> </strong>of the vote — 22 points ahead of his closest competitor, Marco Rubio, who drew 24 percent.<strong> </strong>Ted Cruz came in third place in the state with around 21 percent, Ben Carson<span> </span>came in fourth with around 4.8, and John Kasich<span> </span>came in last with about 3.6 percent.</p>
<p>The victory will put Trump a bit further ahead in the <a href="http://frontloading.blogspot.com/p/2016-republican.html">delegate chase</a>, which he currently leads by a large margin. But he won't gain too much ground — Nevada only has 30 GOP delegates, and it allots them proportionally among all candidates who top 3.33 percent of the vote. The effect of that rule is that the first-place finisher will only end up getting a few more delegates than the second-place finisher — nowhere near the 50-delegate advantage Trump gained from his smaller win in South Carolina.</p>
<p>Still, the Nevada outcome makes it unmistakably clear that Trump is the GOP frontrunner.</p>
<p>He's now won three of the four contests in the first month of voting, and his lead in national polls remains unchallenged. Indeed, Republican elites looking at the calendar and order of contests going forward are increasingly afraid that it may already be too late to stop him, according to a report by <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/donald-trump-gop-nightmare-219652">Politico's Alex Isenstadt</a>.</p>
<p>The win also shows that Trump can indeed do well in a caucus state. After his disappointing second-place finish in Iowa, some believed he'd perform poorly in future caucus states as well, due to what seemed to be his inferior ground game (since turnout operations are more important in lower-turnout caucuses). But he won, and he won big.</p>
<h3>The first phase of the nomination contest is over, and things are about to start happening very quickly</h3>
<p>This brings the first phase of the GOP nomination contest, in which the four "early" states voted over the course of February, to a close. These contests were, overall, more important for how they affected the political world's understanding of the race, and how they winnowed the field, than for the relatively meager sum of delegates they allotted (just 5 percent have been awarded so far).</p>
<p>But now we are headed into a very different phase, because a whole lot of delegates are about to be handed out very quickly.</p>
<p>First there's Super Tuesday on March 1, the first big multistate contest. This year, it's been dubbed the "SEC primary" because so many Southern states are scheduled to vote. Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Minnesota, Alaska, and Vermont will all be holding GOP primaries or caucuses. Together, they account for about a quarter of total Republican delegates.</p>
<p>Until last week, it seemed genuinely unclear whether Trump or Cruz would emerge as the leading candidate in the South. But if <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/march1GOP.html">recent polls</a> and Saturday's South Carolina results are any indication, Trump has gained the upper hand in the region. And since Trump polls particularly well in the Northeast too, March 1 could be a very good night for him.</p>
<p>After that, there will be several more contests spread out in early March, which will culminate in a sort of Super Tuesday II on March 15. On that day, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and the Northern Mariana Islands will all vote. Florida and Ohio, specifically, are big "winner-take-all" states that allot all their delegates to whomever finishes first statewide (as well as being home states to Rubio and Kasich, respectively).</p>
<p>The point is, by the time the dust settles on the Ides of March, about 58 percent of delegates in the GOP contest will have been allotted. So the next three weeks are enormously important. The bigger the delegate lead Trump amasses during this phase, the more difficult he'll be to stop.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11104592/nevada-2016-republican-results-donald-trump-wins-the-caucusesAndrew Prokop