‘Unless You’re a Purist, We Don’t Want You Voting’

LAS VEGAS — Downstairs in a roped-off corner of the lobby at the Ahern Hotel, off the Las Vegas Strip, the chair of the Nevada Republican Party was trying to convince a club of fellow Republicans to go along with a perplexing plan: To hold a party-run caucus two days after the state’s presidential primary in February.

Upstairs, overlooking the lobby, Chuck Muth told me the whole thing wasn’t just counterintuitive or confusing for Republican voters. It smacked of insider “bullshit.” The state party, he said, just “wanted the caucus rigged for Trump.”

And then Muth, a former executive director of the Nevada Republican Party, tried to explain to me how Nevada’s Republicans got into this mess — and helped make their state irrelevant in the process.

On Feb. 6, the state will hold a primary in which GOP voters will go to their usual precincts but there will be only one serious contender, Nikki Haley, on the ballot. Then, two days later, the Republican Party will host a caucus in which GOP voters will go to school gyms and church basements where they can express their support for only one credible candidate, Donald Trump.

Both parties used to hold caucuses here, but in 2021, the Nevada legislature passed a law requiring the state to hold primaries. State GOP officials wanted to stick with the caucus because they’ve done it that way before, and because the state’s new presidential primary requirements failed to include voter ID. It’s the kind of gathering that tends to draw the most fervent, activist members of a party — no coincidence, the same as Trump’s base. GOP officials decided that the caucus would be the only contest that will award delegates to the national convention.

But there have been plenty of reasons to think that decision might turn out to be a mistake.

Last fall, leaders of the group meeting at the Ahern, the Nevada Republican Club — a separate entity from the Nevada Republican Party — urged party officials not to hold a caucus competing with the state-run primary, arguing “negative publicity from this will make the Republican Party look bad and likely diminish participation in the Primary election.”

The effect, they wrote, would be to "frustrate, anger and confuse Nevada's Republican voters,” giving “average voters the impression they don't care about them or their votes."

Looking back, it seems they were right. Recent headlines about the election here have ranged from “EXPERTS: Why Trump, DeSantis are not on Nevada Primary Election ballot” to “Dual elections causing confusion among Nevada Republican voters” to “Nevada Republicans can’t decide between a primary or a caucus — so they’re doing both.”

Earlier this month, a Reno TV station ran a fact check on a social media post from a rural Nevada voter questioning why her primary ballot was “missing a certain DONALD J TRUMP.”

“It’s crazy, it’s nuts,” said Ron Knecht, a former Republican state controller. “It’s the ultimate degeneration of Republican politics.”

It’s also a big comedown for Nevada, which had hoped to parlay its No. 3 spot on the Republican presidential nominating calendar into a measure of relevance in the campaign. There was a time, after all, that Nevada really did feel like the “We Matter,” first-in-the-West caucus state.

For Republicans, that was 2016, when Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were out campaigning on arena stages and casino floors — and where, in one palm tree-lined parking lot not far from the Chicken Ranch Brothel, in Pahrump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rallied a crowd from the bed of a pickup truck. Reporters flew in from Washington to set up live shots and to pore over candidates’ “ground games.”

Today, it’s sometimes easy to forget Nevada even exists on the primary calendar. Haley seems to want to will it away; when she appeared the other day on Fox & Friends, she described the nominating process as going from Iowa, which was “good to us,” to New Hampshire, which would “set the tone as it goes to my sweet home state of South Carolina.” It was South Carolina — not Nevada — that she identified as “the next one” when she addressed supporters after the primary in New Hampshire.

It was Nevada erasure. And it was hard to find anyone who would blame her for it.

Trump polls so highly among Republicans in Nevada that it never made much sense for his opponents to spend time here. And that was before the state Republican Party changed the nominating rules in ways that benefitted the former president.

Muth, who publishes a conservative newsletter in the state, told me that, given the current circumstances, he wouldn’t have recommended any candidate other than Trump visit the state.

“If I was advising them, I’d say this thing’s in the tank for Trump,” he said.

Muth told me he’s a “caucus kind of guy.” He opposed the law switching Nevada to a primary. But once it passed, he said, “we should have just dealt with it.” Now, he worries that when some Republicans turn out for the primary and don’t see Trump’s name on the ballot, it will perpetuate the false idea — inflamed by Trump in 2020 — that elections “can’t be trusted.”

Other Republicans worry about the fallout, too, fearful the dispute might do lasting damage to the party here. Yes, Trump’s base remains loyal to him. But the GOP is also laboring to recover from his losses with the moderate Republicans and conservative-leaning independents. And Republicans in Nevada don’t exactly have a reputation recently of trying to broaden the tent.

Following Trump’s defeat in 2020, a pro-Trump insurgency with ties to the Proud Boys, a militant, far-right group, seized control of the GOP in Nevada’s largest county, Clark. For a time, two competing leadership groups claimed to represent the local GOP. In Northern Nevada’s Washoe County, a traditional bellwether, several GOP officials resigned from their party positions amid an uprising from pro-Trump activists.

To Republicans worried about expanding the party’s reach, a caucus benefitting one candidate was a poor choice.

“We need to start engaging people back in the process,” Danielle Gallant, a Republican state assemblymember from Henderson, a major suburb of Las Vegas, told me.

In a caucus, she said, “what you're talking about is only getting the most diehard [Republicans] in this process instead of the people that are a little bit more moderate. So, it's almost like the party said, ‘Unless you're a purist, we don't want you voting.’”

And for what?

“Trump,” she said, “would have won the primary, anyway."

At the Ahern, Muth shook his head. In 2018, he’d managed the legislative campaign of Dennis Hof, the Nevada pimp who famously won a Republican primary, died before the general election, then won it anyway. Muth supported Trump in 2020. He does communications consulting for some in-state campaigns.

But for the purposes of the presidential primary, Muth said, Nevada might as well have fallen off the map.

“We’re the ugly, red-headed stepchild,” he told me.

He added, “I don’t know that we deserve to be first in the West.”

When political strategists say Trump is running a more professional campaign this year than he did in 2016, what they’re really talking about are two different things.

The first is traditional mechanics — what I saw when I walked into the Trump campaign office here, in a single-story office park whose nearby tenants included a midwifing agency, a lawyer and a mental health center. It had all the typical trappings, from the large cutout of Trump to the “Trump 2024” signs plastering the walls. But it was also full of people working to turn out supporters for the caucus. On a table sat campaign brochures and instructions on how to “register as a Republican and find your caucus location.” In a back room, a group of volunteers who’d just walked in were being trained in caucus organizing.

The whole office was humming.

The other aspect of the professionalized Trump operation has to do with state party apparatuses and the rules of elections. From the early days of his presidency, Trump and his team began working to install loyalists in state parties around the country — or to cement a bond with those, like Nevada’s party chair, who already held office. This has paid off in state rule changes that have the effect of boosting Trump. In California — a Democratic bastion, but with the single largest delegate haul for Republicans of any state because of its population — party officials last year changed their system for awarding delegates to make it possible for Trump, if he wins a majority of the statewide vote, to clinch them all. Similar efforts were undertaken in states across the country, with an aggressive outreach to local party officials.

That includes Trump’s hosting last year of roughly a dozen Nevada Republican Party officials at Mar-a-Lago for a three-hour dinner of steaks and ice cream, where they talked about the political landscape here.

And even in a Republican Party devoted to Trump, Nevada stands out for its fealty.

Following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, the state party chair, Michael McDonald, coordinated with Trump and his advisers on efforts to overturn the results in the state, writing in text messages the day after the election that he was on the phone with Trump and his advisers and that “they want full attack mode,” according to transcripts of testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

McDonald did not respond to a request for comment. But on the day that I met with Muth at the Ahern, he was the invited guest at the Nevada Republican Club meeting downstairs.

From the lobby bar, I could overhear McDonald urging the Republicans in the club to take their personal differences and “stick them in your back pocket” to “start moving forward.” To the critics who “like to talk on Twitter, like to talk on Facebook,” he said, “Be careful what you say, because all you’re doing is dragging down the Republican Party.”

McDonald was one of six Nevada Republicans indicted by a Nevada grand jury last month after falsely claiming to be an elector for Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. (They have pleaded not guilty.) Yet here he was telling Republicans about “ballot security” as a reason to support the party-run caucus, “pushing back” on the state-run primary. Silverware clanked over plates of hibachi chicken and Asian spinach salads and coconut sticky rice.

He said, “For those of you who don’t like the caucus, just come figure it out, volunteer.”

On Saturday, Trump held a rally in Las Vegas, one of the few reminders that the GOP nominating process still runs through Nevada at all. Trump told his supporters, “Don’t worry about the primary, just do the caucus thing.”

The primary, he said, “doesn’t mean anything.”

Turnout for the caucus is expected to be low. And prospects for the state-run primary aren’t great, either.

But Trump is right that the caucus is the one that matters. And the result is a fairly sure bet.

In the state-run primary, it’s not as clear. The prevailing view among Republicans in Nevada is simply that Haley probably will win that race, though earning no delegates from it. It’s not out of the question that voters who take part in a ballot that they know won’t matter in terms of delegates could use the election as a protest vote, meaning Haley could lose to “None of These Candidates.”

That happened in a state gubernatorial primary on the Democratic side in 2014. And it’s how the state’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, plans to vote this year. Lombardo previously criticized his party for prohibiting candidates who participate in the primary from also running in the caucus, calling it “unacceptable for the voters and the understanding of how things should be done.” But this month, he told The Nevada Independent he plans to caucus for Trump and vote in the primary for “none of the above.”

That goes for the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Stavros Anthony, too. In a statement, he called it a “show primary” and encouraged “all voters to do the same” as him.

When I asked David Gibbs, whose term as president of the Nevada Republican Club ended in December, about Haley’s prospects, he said, “She’s probably going to win.”

But if she doesn’t, he said, “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Trump probably didn’t need Nevada Republicans to do anything for him. In states where establishment Republicans worked against him — as in Iowa, where the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, campaigned for Ron DeSantis, or New Hampshire, where the Republican governor, Chris Sununu, campaigned for Haley — it didn’t keep him from piling up big wins.

The fact is that he’s running away with the nomination because enough Republican voters want him to be president again. In some polls, even before DeSantis dropped out, Trump was leading by more than 50 or 60 percentage points in Nevada.

Before I left the state, I drove to a restaurant in Henderson to meet with Stephen Silberkraus, a former Nevada Republican assemblymember and former vice chair of the Clark County GOP. He’d been ousted from his party leadership position in the hard-line group’s takeover, and I wanted to ask about the caucuses and Trump.

I didn’t have to wait for him to get there to get a sense of how some people are feeling. Sitting next to me at the restaurant bar was 49-year-old Angela Werner, who told me she’d been getting emails from the Trump campaign about the caucus and was excited to participate.

Werner works in the hospitality and sports industry and was at the restaurant with a friend. She said she liked the idea of a meeting format better than an election. “It’s like a town hall forum,” she said. “I love that.”

And as I’d find out in few minutes, she really liked the idea of a second Trump term.

Werner was still there when Silberkraus arrived and we started talking. I knew from other conversations with Silberkraus that he thinks the caucus poses “legitimacy issues,” with one winner in the caucus and a different winner in the state-run primary. On top of that, he told me, it “just adds confusion and makes us look like we don’t know how to handle our business.”

But it’s also possible some segment of the GOP is not only willing to tolerate, but may embrace, the idea of havoc in its politics. Trump’s poll numbers here certainly suggest that.

In Nevada, Silberkraus told me, “I think you have a genuine concern that the rule of law and the quality of life is diminishing here because of the changes that are going on around us. I think they see a vote for Trump as an opportunity to protest what they don’t like … They see him as kind of a disruptor, and maybe a Hail Mary or something that they can grab onto in the hope that maybe something can change.”

I wondered aloud if Trump, like “None of These Candidates” or, posthumously, Hof — the brothel owner who’d called himself the “Trump of Pahrump” — could get people in Nevada to vote for him even if he wasn’t a choice. Even if he was dead.

“More than likely,” Silberkraus said.

Werner leaned over.

“If he passed away, I would,” she said.

I asked her why.

“Because I truly believe he’s the change that we need,” she said. “He’s the person we need.”