Two different races are being held in Nevada to choose a Republican presidential nominee.
One grants delegates and the other does not.
On one was Nikki Haley, on the other was Donald Trump.
That mess and the confusion it has created among voters is both a symptom and a cause of long-term damage to democracy and the country's institutions, experts say.
On Tuesday, Nevada held a primary where only former UN ambassador Nikki Haley appeared on the ballot and the de facto Republican leader, Donald Trump, did not appear.
Haley got just 30% of the vote, an embarrassing defeat compared to the “None of these candidates” option, which took 63.2% of the vote, according to the Electoral Decision Table of NBC News and Noticias Telemundo.
Two days later, this Thursday, the Nevada Republican Party is holding caucuses that do award delegates.
Only Trump appears on that ballot.
Voters in Nevada go to the polls for the presidential primary on February 6, 2024.Reuters
Why did this happen?
A new state law passed in 2021 requires that primaries be held instead of caucuses, as has always been done before.
But state parties are the ones that decide how to award delegates, so the Nevada Republican Party didn't agree to have primaries, sued the state to try to prevent it, and decided they would award their delegates with caucuses.
And thanks to the rules they established, only Trump would be on that ballot.
Nevada is “rigged in favor of Trump,” Nikki Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney told reporters in a conference call Monday, adding: “We haven't spent a penny or an ounce of energy in Nevada ”.
“And to be fair, it is rigged,” said Rebecca Gill, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
The Nevada caucuses “were created to deliver all the convention votes to Donald Trump… They have not hidden it and it is not a secret.”
The caucuses were designed and run by staunch Trump allies in the Nevada Republican Party.
Five of them were accused in court for trying to subvert the 2020 elections, the so-called
fake voters
or
fake delegates, who were supposed to cast their Electoral College vote for whoever won in Nevada (which in 2020 was current President Joe Biden) but instead planned to cast their vote for Trump.
According to the rules they used for the Nevada caucuses, candidates can participate in the primaries or the caucuses, not both.
The race in Nevada is an example of what Trump's team, whether his administration or his campaign, has done in the courts and by aggressively using party rules to ensure they win the nomination, Gill explains.
A voter wears an "I Voted" sticker with the Las Vegas skyline at a Clark County voting center on Election Day during the 2024 Nevada presidential primary election in Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 6, 2024. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
It is important to note that, although this race is criticized by some as “rigged” (which means that its result is predetermined), “what the Trump campaign is doing is not illegal.
He has used the courts and his allies in the party to bend the rules in his favor.
That's what campaigns do,” Gill notes.
Trump's campaign denied it was rigging the election, pointing out that the caucus system had been created by Nevada Republican leaders.
“I can't help it that in Nevada the vast majority of Republicans work and vote for Donald Trump and not Nikki Haley,” Chris LaCivita, Trump's senior campaign adviser, told The New York Times.
Noticias Telemundo attempted to contact the Trump campaign but has not received a response.
Confuse and conquer
Many Republican voters in Nevada did not fully understand what was happening during this Tuesday's primary.
By noon, only 30 people had voted at Martha King Elementary School in Boulder City.
Alison Inglett, a Republican voter, told NBC News that she will not be able to vote in a caucus on Thursday, and that
she opted for the “None of these candidates” option
in Tuesday's primary.
“I think it adds too much confusion,” he said of the separate races.
“I think it's just another way to manipulate the political system.
And it doesn't really give everyone a chance to speak and give their opinion on the candidates.”
“A lot of people are confused on the Republican side, because you have two options here,” Tom Sobol, a registered Republican, told NBC News after casting his vote in Las Vegas.
Sobol said he also planned to go to the caucus to vote for Trump on Thursday.
“It's kind of sad, you know, they changed the rules,” he said.
“I think everyone believes that Donald Trump will win anyway.”
Is it undemocratic?
For decades there have been calls to end caucuses precisely because they are considered undemocratic by legal and electoral experts.
“There is evidence that caucuses attract ideologically extreme participants,” writes Costas Panagopoulous, head of the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University and an expert on campaigns and elections, voting behavior, and political psychology.
A voter prepares to vote at a machine inside a polling place on the day of the Nevada presidential primary in Las Vegas, on February 6, 2024. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
"Scholars routinely lament the low turnout in caucuses, even compared to primaries, and the inequalities in turnout between these two types of races raise concerns about the potential to introduce bias and misrepresentations into the electoral process," adds Panagopoulous. , who has been part of the NBC News Decision Desk team since the 2006 election.
In recent years, editorials in the country's major media outlets, from Washington, DC, to Iowa and New York, have called for the abolition of caucuses.
Caucuses themselves are less democratic because they impose more barriers to voting, and this year's caucuses in Nevada went even further, Gill explains.
"You have to be at a specific time and a specific place and be there for a specific amount of time for your vote to count. On the other hand,
primaries lower those barriers and increase participation"
because you can vote in advance, by mail and in person.
"It is more flexible and accessible so that normal people can vote," says the expert.
In contrast, caucuses are strictly controlled and attract far fewer voters with a more specific profile: people who do not work hourly, as is the case with many Latino and black voters who cannot take the day to go vote in person. .
"In 2024, the Trump campaign did a sort of tour of the country to get the state parties to adjust to what benefits Trump," says Gill.
"And what became clear is that what benefited Trump in Nevada was a caucus, because it emphasizes the votes of people who do not have two jobs, who can be in person at a caucus, who are more enthusiastic about voting "And all of that describes Trump's base."
A mail-in ballot drop box at a Clark County voting center on the day of the Nevada presidential primary in Las Vegas, February 6, 2024. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
What does it mean for the rest of the country and for the November elections?
This tactic of the parties of choosing the electorate that best suits them is not new: it is the same one that is used, for example, to redraw, in ways from creative to bizarre, electoral districts, what is known as Gerrymandering.
But what the Nevada Republican Party did went further, "it's of a different nature," says Gill.
It is a similar operating procedure to the one used by the Trump campaign to try to reverse the results of the 2020 election, when they questioned the results of urban areas, where the least people vote for him, but did not question any rural areas, where the most They vote for it.
“Many of these state parties are openly collaborating with the Trump campaign because they share that interest in supporting him.
That's very unusual.
They are treating him as if he were the current president,”
Gill explains.
And in the case of the
fake voters
in Nevada, for them Trump is the legitimate winner of the 2020 elections.
The erosion of trust
It's also the same operating procedure behind the erosion of voting rights in the country's courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, Gill explains.
It is also a symptom and cause of the erosion of confidence in elections and in the institutions that support democracy in the country.
"I'm concerned about trust in the process. The erosion didn't start in Nevada and it certainly didn't help either. The more barriers we put on voting the more apathy we're going to see. Elections are what make a democracy a democracy... But if I need an hour to explain to you what is happening in the elections here, something is very wrong. That confusion sows nihilism and cynicism."
Gill explains that this lack of trust is spreading to other institutions, such as the courts that issue rulings on elections, and the media that cover them.
"Everything becomes rigged, everything is a power play, and the law becomes just a set of rules to seize power," Gill says.
"We have never lived up to the founding documents of this country, particularly with minorities, blacks, Latinos and women, among others. But this is different."