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In this edition: Nevada’s zombie primary, the federal investigation into Rep. Cori Bush, and pre-pri͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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January 30, 2024
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David Weigel

The Republican primaries were built for Donald Trump

Anadolu via Getty Images/Peter Zay

THE SCENE

LAS VEGAS – In one week, Nevada will host the first-in-the-west presidential primary, as state law requires. Nikki Haley will win it. And it won’t matter, because Republicans decided to hold a separate caucus two days later — with Donald Trump on the ballot, but not Haley.

“A woman who claims to be fiscally conservative just wasted $5 million in Nevada taxpayers money, for a nothing result that gives her a plastic tiara and a participation trophy,” said Michael McDonald, the chairman of the state Republican Party.

Trump is skipping Nevada’s non-binding primary in favor of the caucus, which Haley isn’t contesting, and which local Republicans will use to assign the state’s 26 delegates. (Candidates could only pick one to compete in.) McDonald’s party made that choice last year, along with limits on how super PACs — a critical part of ground operations for rival candidates — could organize at caucus sites. That drove the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down out of the state, denouncing “Trump-inspired rigging.”

As Trump’s allies try to nudge Haley out of the race, and as the Haley campaign fundraises off the pressure, the former president’s pre-established primary advantages are coming into view. The race has moved from two early states with proportional delegate rules and easy crossover voting — both helpful to Haley — into states built for Trump.

“We’re not going to have a lot of competition, I think, but it doesn’t matter,” Trump said at a Saturday rally here. “We want to get a great, beautiful mandate.”

In South Carolina, where Haley consistently polls behind Trump, delegates in the Feb. 24 primary are winner-take-all; a race as close as New Hampshire’s would leave Trump with 50 delegates. In Michigan, the state GOP will assign just 16 delegates based on Feb. 27 primary results and pick the other 39 at a March 2 convention, the kind that Trump supporters have dominated.

Even in the Virgin Islands, where both Trump and Haley have sent surrogates ahead of the Feb. 8 caucuses, the national RNC’s opposition to ranked-choice voting cut their delegate pool from nine to 4 — and an upset win for Haley would come the same day as Trump’s sure-thing Nevada win. Even Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, who was critical of the party’s decision to hold a caucus next week that he said would confuse voters, has said he’ll write “none of the above” on his primary ballot and then caucus for Trump.

Haley and her campaign have described a race that will take two months to settle. “We’ll have all the time we need to defeat Joe Biden,” Haley said in her New Hampshire concession speech last week. In a campaign memo distributed before the speech, Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney looked toward Super Tuesday on March 5, when 11 of 16 voting states “have open or semi-open primaries.”

But Nevada comes first, and Haley is shrugging it off. In New Hampshire, the candidate told reporters that she’d “focus on the states that are fair,” which did not include Nevada, where “the Trump train” rolled over the process.

“Talk to the people in Nevada,” Haley said. “They will tell you the caucuses have been sealed up, bought and paid for a long time. So, that’s why we got into the primary.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Six months ago, the Trump campaign’s work to get favorable primary rules in early states looked like an insurance policy. What if something went awry in Iowa or New Hampshire?

Trump won both, and his endorsers are in a holding pattern as Haley continues her campaign. They explain that party rules make it hard for Haley to compete with Trump, even though just two small states have voted; they say that preventing Trump from moving on, immediately, is hurting the effort to beat Joe Biden.

“We have blown over $400 million to determine that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee,” RNC Arizona committeeman Tyler Bowyer told activists and fellow RNC members on Monday, at a two-day election strategy conference hosted here by Turning Point USA. Hours earlier, Republican Party of Texas chairman Matt Rinaldi had endorsed Trump, judging that “the threat our nation faces from the Democrats, globalists, and fake Republicans that hand power to Democrats is truly extraordinary.”

Haley, who’s picked up no Republican endorsements since New Hampshire, isn’t affected by this. Goading her to quit the race backfired, in important ways; a RNC resolution that would have declared Trump as the party’s presumptive nominee was pulled after Trump turned on it, and helped Haley raise money. Talking with national media, campaigning in South Carolina cities where she draws big crowds, Haley gets covered as the only Trump alternative at a moment when he’s losing defamation lawsuits.

But the primary really is made for Trump. In their own spin memo, circulated to reporters this week, Trump’s campaign pointed to state winner-take-all rules — some implemented last year — that would pad his lead even if Haley’s support surged. What if Haley won 43.2% of the primary vote after Super Tuesday? She’d take 12.1% of the remaining delegates. The math checks out.

THE VIEW FROM THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

The Monday memo from Trump co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles looked to another date, out of Haley’s control, that’ll shrink her path to victory: The Democratic race in South Carolina, scheduled for Saturday. “Anyone who votes in the February 3rd Democrat primary cannot vote in the GOP primary on February 24th,” they wrote, “so Nikki’s losing strategy of counting on Democrats to pollute the Primary won’t work.”

THE VIEW FROM HALEY SUPPORTERS

Very few Nevada Republicans have stepped out to endorse Haley. The most prominent is Amy Tarkanian, a former state party chair who believes that the current leadership erred by creating a caucus.

“If Trump is so far ahead in the polls, as they say, then this caucus scheme is a waste of resources,” Tarkanian said. She was still meeting voters who were confused or annoyed by the dual primary/caucus pile-up, and expected Haley to benefit from winning the non-competitive Feb. 6 race: “She will most likely come up on top with a feather in her cap, and that will encourage donors to support her.”

THE VIEW FROM NEVADA DEMOCRATS

Nevada Democrats started the state-run primary, as an effort to generate more interest and turn out more voters than the 2008 vintage caucus. Encouraged by the early numbers, they’re critical of Republicans for not wanting to play along.

“Democrats passed legislation moving from a caucus to a presidential preference primary to simplify the process and make voting easier and more accessible,” Nevada State Democratic Party Chair Daniele Monroe-Moreno told Semafor in a statement. “But the Nevada GOP is committed to confusing voters and making it harder for them to participate — all in the name of boosting their MAGA leader Donald Trump.”

NOTABLE

  • In the Nevada Independent, strategist Michael Schaus asks why “Trump loyalists running the party are seemingly uninterested in building a coalition of ideologically diverse center-right voters and politicians.”
  • In the AP, Thomas Beaumont previews the closed-door RNC meeting unfolding in Las Vegas this week, after the Trump endorsement resolution was 86’d. “Trump batted down the proposal, which some members of the committee criticized publicly as premature.”
  • For NBC News, Matt Dixon and Jonathan allen look at Haley’s challenge in convincing anti-Trump voters to cross over in the South Carolina primary, when there’s “little evidence of any significant appetite for crossover voting in the Palmetto State.”
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State of Play

Missouri. Rep. Cori Bush acknowledged that she was under federal investigation on Tuesday, admitting that her “campaign’s spending on security services” was being probed by the Justice Department. It was a result of “frivolous” complaints from “right-wing organizations,” she said: “I retained my husband as part of my security team to provide security services because he has extensive experience in this area.” Bush faces St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell in the August primary, and the challenger raised half a million dollars in his first months as a candidate, helped by donors angry with Bush’s support for a Gaza ceasefire.

Wisconsin. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the GOP-ed legislature’s first re-drawn maps, continuing a stand-off between Republicans who want to keep lines that make it hard to dislodge them and Democrats who won last year’s state supreme court race. “Republicans passed maps to help make sure Republican-gerrymandered incumbents get to keep their seats,” Evers explained. If there is no agreed-upon map by Thursday, the state court, with a 4-3 liberal majority, will take the lead on redrawing it.

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Ads
Nikki Haley for President

Nikki Haley for President, “Haley Bucks the System.” Three and a half weeks from the South Carolina primary, Haley’s paid messaging keeps reintroducing her as the race’s last establishment-fighter. “They aren’t ready for me,” she says, in a mash-up of campaign speeches over rally b-roll – most of the remarks from her New Hampshire primary night speech, most of the footage from her stops back home.

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Polls

This pollster’s first look at the primary matches what longer-tenured pollsters keep finding: A massive Trump lead built by his high approval ratings with Republican voters. Haley actually runs marginally stronger with self-identified Republicans than she did in New Hampshire, up to 28% from 26%. She trails because Trump runs far stronger with this state’s independents, winning them by 15 points after losing them 2-1 last week. Her good news: One in nine likely primary voters have no opinion of her, suggesting that the time and money she’s spending can help her. It’s her home state, but she last appeared on the ballot 10 years ago.

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On the Trail
Getty Images/Spencer Platt

White House. Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll, a federal jury in New York ruled in the defamation case against him. Very few Republicans weighed in against Trump after the judgment was reached on Friday; Nikki Haley was the exception

“I absolutely trust the jury, and I think that they made their decision based on the evidence,” Haley said in a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Haley ramped up her criticism of Trump at weekend rallies in South Carolina, spending up to 10 minutes attacking him in her updated stump speech. In Conway, she mocked the “temper tantrum” he’d had over her refusal to drop out after the New Hampshire primary, telling him to “man up” and debate her, and dismissing his endorsers — including Sen. Tim Scott, who she appointed — as establishment losers.

“You’re gonna sit there and have Lindsey Graham stand up next to you and we’re supposed to say oh, that’s what we need to be doing? All right,” said Haley. “I’m just gonna let the one on Tim Scott go. That’s up to y’all. I’m not gonna say anything about it. We have to live with our decisions.”

Future Forward, a pro-Biden super PAC, announced $250 million in swing state ad buys, a mix of digital and TV spots in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“That’s going to buy a lot of mind share,” Steve Bannon told Republican activists on Tuesday morning, at a Turning Point USA conference for RNC members before the party’s official winter meeting. Democrats were spending on their nominee, he said, while Republicans were still indulging a “vanity” campaign for Nikki Haley.

Democrats do still have a primary: Dean Phillips filed a complaint in Wisconsin’s supreme court on Monday, asking to be allowed onto the ballot after the state party didn’t place him. “Voters should choose the nominee of our party without insiders trying to rig the process for Joe Biden,” Phillips said in a statement. The same day, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint, asking for an investigation into any possible coordination between Phillips’s team and the pro-Phillips Better PAC.

“There was absolutely no prohibited coordination between these former unpaid volunteers and the campaign,” Phillips’ campaign responded to Semafor. “The campaign complies with all federal campaign finance laws.”

House. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued its first 16 “red to blue” swing seat endorsements on Monday, taking sides in the Oregon primary we covered last week — state Rep. Janelle Bynum got the nod over Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who ousted a Blue Dog Democrat in 2022 only to lose the seat in November. (Emily’s List also endorsed Bynum, part of an ongoing effort by party organizations to help a candidate they see as more electable.)

Biden carried the district in 2020, as well as 11 of the other new targets — all of which are currently Republican-held, except for Michigan’s 7th District, which Rep. Elissa Slotkin is vacating to run for Senate.

Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger joined the mini-wave of Democratic retirements on Friday, becoming the 12th Democrat to retire without seeking higher office. It was “time to pass the torch,” he explained, bemoaning what Congress would be missing without him — “members who care more about constituents and our country and less about cable news hits.”

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Next
  • four days until the South Carolina Democratic primary
  • nine days until the Republican caucuses in Nevada
  • 14 days until the special election to replace George Santos
  • 25 days until the South Carolina Republican primary
  • 286 days until the 2024 presidential election
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