With about 97 percent of the vote counted so far in Nevada’s Thursday GOP caucus, disgraced former President Trump’s 59,545 vote win over his only opponent Ryan Binkley, who received 536 votes, is impressive for the “incumbent” campaign he acts like he’s running. By that standard however he’s still a pretty distant second to the actual incumbent, President Joe Biden, who received 112,611 votes in Nevada’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday.
If turnout in a nominating contest is a measure of enthusiasm in the general election – and Trump’s campaign themselves are harping on his getting the most votes ever in a Nevada caucus – then pretty plainly Biden has the enthusiasm edge in the Silver State, and a very large one a that.
Now we sort of fucked up earlier this week when we described the Nevada GOP-run caucus as the first ever while the state’s always had a primary system. We got that backward because on Tuesday was the first primary after decades of party-run caucuses. The very MAGA Nevada GOP wanted no part of the new state government-conducted primary system, which is why Trump and Binkley ran in the caucus and Nikki Haley ran in the Republican primary on Tuesday.
Where she still lost to “None of these candidates,” a non-candidate option that NBC elections egghead Steve Kornacki said was “generally assumed to be a proxy for Trump.” Not sure if we buy that given the very obvious question of then why the fuck didn’t the Trump fans just vote in the caucus on Thursday instead? Setting aside the whole can of worms that a shit ton of them may have simply (and unlawfully) voted in both the GOP primary and caucus, Biden still received a few thousand more votes total as “None of these candidates” scored 47,134 in the Republican primary.