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The next state on the Republican primary calendar is Nevada. But there is a reason everyone is talking about South Carolina instead: The early February contest in Nevada is a structural mess that the state’s own governor has called “unacceptable for the voters.”
The upshot: Nikki Haley won’t appear on the same ballot as former President Donald J. Trump in the Silver State. And only the ballot with Mr. Trump’s name on it will result in the awarding of delegates that count toward the nominating process.
For decades, Nevada has held caucuses to determine whom its voters want to nominate for president. But after the 2020 Democratic primary was marred by a flawed reporting process, the state passed a law eliminating the caucus and replacing it with a primary. Voting will be conducted by mail, with every registered voter automatically receiving a ballot, and state officials scheduled both parties’ primaries for Tuesday, Feb. 6.
But Republicans — who have joined Mr. Trump in spending the past four years baselessly attacking mail-in voting as unsecure — objected to the change. The state’s governor, Joe Lombardo, proposed legislation last year that would have implemented stricter voter identification laws and imposed some limits on mail-in voting, but it was shot down by the Democratic-controlled state legislature.
So the Nevada Republican Party decided to organize caucuses instead. They’ll be held two days later, on Thursday, Feb. 8, with their own rules: in-person voting only, hand counting of ballots and a voter identification requirement. (The party also sued, unsuccessfully, to get the state-run primary thrown out.)
Nevada Republicans have stipulated that the caucuses, not the primary, will determine who receives the state’s 26 delegates to the Republican National Convention in July. Voters can also cast ballots in the primary if they want to, but those votes won’t have any bearing on the presidential nomination.
But there’s another twist: The state party declared that any candidate who put his or her name on the ballot for the primary would be ineligible for inclusion on caucus ballots. That meant each candidate had to choose which contest to compete in.
Ms. Haley chose the state-run primary, as did former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who aren’t running anymore but will still be listed. Mr. Trump and the rest of the candidates who have since dropped out chose the party-run caucuses.
In other words, Ms. Haley is pretty much guaranteed to win the primary on Feb. 6, because Mr. Trump won’t be an option — but Mr. Trump is essentially guaranteed to win the caucuses on Feb. 8, because Ms. Haley won’t be an option. Mr. Trump will collect the state’s delegates, but that won’t say anything about the competition between them, because no voter will have the option to choose between them.
All this has caused abject confusion — and anger — among the Silver State’s voters. At a time when many Republican voters have been conditioned by Mr. Trump’s debunked claims of voter fraud to see conspiracies where they do not exist, the arrival of primary ballots missing the former president’s name has sent some into a frenzy on social media.
“Trump and DeSantis are missing from Nevada primary ballots. Election fraud,” one user wrote. Another, in a post on X that went viral, asked angrily: “Why is my official primary mail in ballot missing a certain DONALD J TRUMP?”
The Nevada Republican Party has attempted to clean up the mess, replying to more than a dozen such comments on the X platform with information about the caucuses.
Michael McDonald, the party chairman, said in a statement that it was “unfortunate” that there was a “failure to mention the existence of the traditional caucus on the millions of mail ballots that were sent out, resulting in an entirely unnecessary flood of calls and emails into government offices.” He added that the primary was a “brand-new, unnecessary, very expensive process.”
Some — including Jon Ralston, the respected Nevada political journalist and commentator — have argued that the competing primary-caucus system was “rigged” to benefit Mr. Trump, who enjoys tremendous support among the state Republican Party. Mr. McDonald himself was one of the people indicted in the fake elector scheme to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
The super PAC aligned with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who dropped out of the presidential race last week, echoed Mr. Ralston’s comments last year.
Mr. McDonald said it had “never been a secret” that he is friends with Mr. Trump, but said the party had “taken every step necessary to make the caucus as open and transparent as possible for all candidates that chose to participate in it.”
Allegations that the caucuses were slanted to benefit Mr. Trump, Mr. McDonald said, seemed to have been started by Mr. DeSantis’ camp and then picked up by Ms. Haley, “likely because her campaign deliberately decided to not compete in Nevada at a time when she wasn’t polling strongly. Her campaign likely now regrets that decision, and is looking for an excuse to explain that tactical error.”
Mr. Lombardo, the state’s Republican governor, has criticized the process, saying in an interview with a local political show last year that he thought it was “detrimental to the candidates” and would “disenfranchise a number of voters.”
“It just continues the disarray or the chaos that’s occurring within the Republican Party currently,” Mr. Lombardo said, referring to the turmoil last year over picking a new speaker in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Lombardo, who has endorsed Mr. Trump, has said he will select the “none of these candidates” option on his primary ballot, and then vote for the former president in the caucuses two days later. But he hopes the split process does not happen again.
“Governor Lombardo is choosing to participate in the primary and in the caucus, but he doesn’t think Nevada voters (or candidates) should have to choose moving forward,” Elizabeth Ray, a spokeswoman for the governor, said in a statement. “The governor has expressed his concerns about the confusion around this process with the Nevada Republican Party.”
Voters’ bewilderment surrounding the process has overshadowed any actual attempts to campaign, said Jeremy Gellman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“The discussion in the state has been focused more on clearing up confusion rather than the merits of the different candidates,” he said.
Still, Mr. Gellman said the split system could allow both candidates to declare victory in Nevada — as Mr. Trump already did on Tuesday night. If more voters participate in the primary than the caucuses, Ms. Haley could argue that she won the contest that mattered most.
“I suspect she’s hoping to walk out of Nevada saying X-tens-of-thousands of Nevada Republicans want me to be the nominee,” Mr. Gellman said. “She’s able to say, ‘I won the Nevada Republican primary, Trump won the caucus, but this is really what mattered here.’”
Sixteen days later, the race will resume — if Ms. Haley is still running — with a primary in South Carolina. Both candidates will appear on the same ballot for the head-to-head matchup in Ms. Haley’s home state that she long sought.