The Democratic caucus in Nevada was last Saturday. Nevada Republicans caucus tonight. Trump, being a Las Vegas kind of guy, is expected to win, but second place could help Rubio or Cruz.
I’ll try to post the results here, if they are available before it gets too late. The thing is, the Republican party in Nevada is notoriously poorly organized and ill-funded, and its previous caucuses since they started in 2008 have been chaotic. So things could get interesting, in a bad way. Details after the jump.
From Elena Schneider, Nevada caucus calamity worries GOP, Politico:
Nevada Republican Party staffers have been hosting caucus training sessions for months. Republican campaign volunteers have been knocking on doors and calling voters since last summer. The candidates themselves have been collecting endorsements and holding events across the state since last spring.
Yet on the eve of Tuesday evening’s GOP caucus, no one has a firm sense of who’s winning here. And worse, there’s an undercurrent of nervousness about the prospect of a caucus calamity.
“It’s true, the smartest people just don’t know what’s going to happen here,” said Pete Ernaut, a Republican consultant who signed on with Marco Rubio on Sunday night. “Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. Nevada loves to be independent, but that can also get in the way of being organized and coalesced around an important event, so it doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Republican campaigns and state operatives point to a number of factors creating the cloud of confusion: a cash-poor state party in disarray, a public unaccustomed to the caucus process and a state that’s notoriously difficult to poll. Nevada doesn’t have a lot of experience running caucuses — the state picked up its first-in-the-West status in 2008, but it has yet to run smoothly, and some campaigns are bracing for possible chaos again.
“I think all campaigns have some concerns. The caucus process is messy, and there will inevitably be problems,” said a Republican presidential operative working in Nevada who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But the [Republican National Committee] is helping, and I think the state and county parties are much better organized than they have been previously. [But] I don’t think anyone thinks this will go off without some problems at some level. It is the nature of a caucus, but we all expect this to go more smoothly than it has previously.”
[Keep reading. . .]
See also Sabotage and High-Card Draws: Why the Nevada Caucuses Will Get Weird
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