There’s failure and then there’s failure.
Someone at the Haley campaign didn’t see this one coming. In the meaningless Nevada primary on Tuesday, Nikki Haley competed against several unknown candidates and a few former candidates. Noticeably missing from the ballot was the name Trump. Instead, the former president opted to participate in the Nevada GOP caucus on Thursday.
What would’ve been expected to be an empty victory for Haley instead turned into an embarrassing rebuke, according to ABC News:
In the Republican primary in Nevada, Nikki Haley appeared to lose decisively to the option “None of these Candidates” on Tuesday night, a troubling sign for her campaign as she seeks desperately needed electoral momentum.
With the majority of the expected vote reported for Republicans, “none of these candidates” received nearly double the votes that Haley earned as of early Wednesday morning.
“None of these candidates,” Haley, a number of longshot challengers and two former GOP candidates — Mike Pence and Tim Scott — were on Nevada’s primary ballot.
Pence and Scott received a few thousand votes combined and some of the minor candidates garnering several hundred in total.
The Haley campaign did not respond directly to a question about their loss, instead releasing a statement where they called Thursday’s caucuses a “game rigged for Trump.”
Haley couldn’t win Iowa in a three-person race. She couldn’t win New Hampshire in a two-person race, and now she lost in Nevada as the only viable candidate on the ballot.
Of course, Haley calls the Nevada game “rigged” in favor of Trump, but it’s no different than the Iowa caucus process. The Nevada Republican Party didn’t want to participate in an open primary where Democrats and crossover voters would tip the scales, as they did in New Hampshire.
The Haley campaign knew this all ahead of time but they opted to sit out the caucus with the hope of winning an uncontested primary. Along the way, they gave up a chance to earn delegates in the state.
In short, they gambled and lost. A fitting result in the state famous for the Las Vegas strip.
Instead of taking the empty “Haley wins Nevada primary” headline, she’ll be heading to her home state later this month with no delegates and an embarrassing loss to “None of these candidates.”
The Nevada Republican caucus is set for Thursday, February 8.
In other news, Joe Biden won the Nevada Democratic primary by around 90%.
