Wild and Weird Nevada Delivers a Predictable Result
Matt Purple
Politics, United States
At the end of the electoral maelstrom Trump triumphed.
The Nevada Republican caucuses often go overlooked by political analysts. A mere thirty delegates are at stake, a wisp of those that are allotted a week later on Super Tuesday. And anyways, Nevada is on Pacific Time, meaning the results don’t start trickling in until after the East Coast is already in bed.
It’s a shame. Nevada is one of the weirdest, wackiest, most anomalous political spectacles of the election year. It’s incredibly difficult to poll, since so much of its population is concentrated in the Las Vegas area where night jobs and daytime hangovers are common. It’s done in caucuses, which require an unconventional ground game from the candidates. Demographically, it’s a variegated mixture of hardcore conservatives, secular city-dwellers, Mormons, unionized service industry workers and Latinos—one of the least religious states in the nation and one of the most unemployed. It switched to early caucuses in 2007; since then, Mitt Romney has won both its Republican contests.
Nevada also has a reputation for unmitigated bedlam. GOP county officials are responsible for their respective caucuses and the newness of the process has created plenty of technical snags. Four years ago, it took three days for Nevada officials to certify a mere 33,000 ballots. “We’re not like Iowa, where people have been doing this since the dawn of time,” former Nevada Republican chairman James Smack shrugged to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Oh, and then after the delegates were finally assigned, most of them defected to Ron Paul at the Republican National Convention.
So when record turnout was reported in Nevada on Tuesday, most observers braced for a long, bleary-eyed and potentially wild night. That impression only deepened when reports started emerging on Twitter of voters not registered, ballots lying on tables, mislabeled caucus sites, party sources throwing around terms like “disaster” and “sh*t show.” It wasn’t long before Nevada officials were investigating reports of double voting.
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