{"id":741,"date":"2024-02-08T00:09:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-08T00:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/08\/in-nevada-nikki-haley-finishes-second-to-the-concept-of-donald-trump\/"},"modified":"2024-02-08T00:09:58","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T00:09:58","slug":"in-nevada-nikki-haley-finishes-second-to-the-concept-of-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/08\/in-nevada-nikki-haley-finishes-second-to-the-concept-of-donald-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"In Nevada, Nikki Haley finishes second to the concept of Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Since Nevada instituted its half-cynical, half-furious \u201cnone of these candidates\u201d option for election ballots about 50 years ago, the nihilistic choice has prevailed in only a handful of actual contests. Voters often use it as a way of expressing frustration about particular candidates or races as they complete the rest of their ballots; only rarely are there enough supporters of no one for no one to enjoy an actual victory.<\/p>\n

Tuesday night\u2019s Republican presidential primary is now part of that handful. The contest had no effect on the selection of the party\u2019s nominee since, thanks to internal party fighting, it didn\u2019t award any delegates. If it did, though, \u201cno one\u201d would have received about twice as many delegates as former ambassador Nikki Haley, the only one of the two remaining candidates in the contest to appear on the Nevada ballot.<\/p>\n

Put another way: More than 42,000 Nevada Republicans turned out to vote in a meaningless contest solely to pick \u201cno one\u201d instead of voting for Haley. But those votes weren\u2019t really for \u201cno one\u201d in this case. They were for \u201cno one on the ballot\u201d \u2014 or, more specifically, for Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Haley lost every county in the state. In every county, in fact, \u201cno one\u201d\/imaginary Trump got at least half of the votes cast. On average, \u201cno one\u201d received 7 in 10 votes in Nevada\u2019s counties. Haley\u2019s best county was Washoe, on the state\u2019s northwestern edge. There, she lost to no one by about the same margin as she lost to Trump in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

New Hampshire offers an interesting analogy, in fact. On the Democratic side there last month, President Biden didn\u2019t appear on the ballot, providing his challengers, including Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), with an opportunity to make a statement.<\/p>\n

Instead, Biden supporters launched a write-in campaign that earned the president nearly two-thirds of the vote. Phillips, who ran a real campaign, managed only 20 percent.<\/p>\n

Nevada\u2019s Republican primary was similar. Haley didn\u2019t put any significant resources into the state, and she managed 31 percent of the vote rather than 20 percent. But she was swamped by a seemingly grass-roots effort to make a statement of support for the front-runner. Also, like it was for Phillips, the result was an embarrassment that sharpens questions about why she is pressing forward in the race.<\/p>\n

How do we know that those \u201cnone of these candidates\u201d votes were proxy votes for Trump? Well, beyond comparing the Nevada primary to New Hampshire\u2019s, we can look at one of the most consistent demographic identifiers of support for Trump and Trump-endorsed candidates: education.<\/p>\n

Of Nevada\u2019s 17 counties, the ones with the highest percentages of residents who have a high school degree or less chose \u201cno one\u201d by the widest margins. The counties with the highest percentages of college graduates gave Haley her heaviest support.<\/p>\n

Haley has pledged to stay in the race until her home state of South Carolina near the end of the month. There\u2019s only one more contest before then, Thursday\u2019s Nevada caucuses in which the state\u2019s delegates will actually be awarded. Trump will clean up there, further pulling away from Haley in the race to clinch the party\u2019s nomination. Perhaps Haley will stick around despite that.<\/p>\n

That said, we should put a fine point on what happened Tuesday. It was understood that the contest was meaningless and won\u2019t affect the nomination directly. But it also became a moment in which Trump\u2019s supporters \u2014 a heavy majority of the party, as they have been for some time \u2014 sent an unsubtle message to Haley.<\/p>\n

To wit: We are so committed to Trump that two of us will turn out to cast a meaningless vote for no one for every one of your voters.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This post appeared first on The Washington Post<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Nevada instituted its half-cynical, half-furious \u201cnone of these candidates\u201d option for election ballots about 50 years ago, the nihilistic choice has prevailed in only a handful of actual contests. Voters often use it as a way of expressing frustration about particular candidates or races as they complete the rest of their ballots; only rarely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}