Trump’s win came hours after the Supreme Court heard arguments on an effort to remove him from the ballot in Colorado.
LAS VEGAS—Former President Donald Trump, as expected, cruised to victory in the Nevada GOP Caucus on Feb. 8, putting him one step closer to winning his party’s nomination.
The former president faced no significant opposition in the contest. His sole remaining major challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, opted to instead compete in a Nevada primary two days earlier that didn’t award any delegates. Ms. Haley suffered an embarrassing setback when voters overwhelmingly chose “None of These Candidates” over her in the Feb. 6 contest.
President Trump is now poised to sweep up all the state’s 26 delegates. He also is entitled to at least four delegates in the U.S. Virgin Islands caucus, held the same day as Nevada. In the Virgin Islands, he won 74 percent of the votes and Ms. Haley scored about 26 percent.
In Thursday’s Nevada caucus, the only other valid candidate was Ryan Binkley, a Texas businessman whose presidential run has barely registered. He earned less than 1 percent of the votes in last month’s GOP nominating contests in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
In two prior contests, the AP rapidly called the race for President Trump in Iowa on Jan. 10 and in New Hampshire on Jan. 23.
Nevada’s unusual primary-and-caucus situation occurred because the state GOP refused to recognize the state’s new presidential preference primary.
Democrat lawmakers instituted that format under a new law. But the state Republican Party stuck with its time-honored caucuses, meetings where residents gather to discuss the presidential hopefuls and vote for their favorite.
Bruce Parks, chair of Nevada’s Washoe County GOP, told The Epoch Times in a phone interview that he was shuttling among several locations to replenish ballot supplies that had run out.
Mr. Parks said 62,000 ballots were printed for his county alone, where there are more than 103,000 registered Republicans. That’s about 6,000 more than registered Democrats, he said.
Mr. Parks said, “We had lines that went outside the school and around the block at several locations.”
By Janice Hisle
