The colourful tycoon recorded his third straight win in the race for the Republican nomination for president.
Advertisement
Donald Trump was declared the victor of the Nevada Republican presidential caucuses early Wednesday morning, extending his lead in the nomination fight before the nationwide contests next week.
After New Hampshire in the Northeast and SC in the South, Trump’s win in Nevada shows that he can also score in the West. He bested his only real remaining rivals, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, by more than 20 percentage points.
‘And soon the country will start winning, winning, winning’.
“It’s an attempt to show that he is tougher than Trump and more willing to crack down”, said Matt Dallek, an assistant professor at The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
At stake in Nevada were 30 delegates, which will be awarded both proportionally based on the at-large statewide vote and by who wins the state’s four congressional districts.
He now heads into next week’s Super Tuesday vote in 11 states with his rivals struggling to find a way to stop him.
Sen. Ted Cruz finished third. Not only would Rubio be symbolically humiliated by losing his home state, Trump would pick up a massive delegate haul, since Florida allots all its 99 delegates to whoever comes in first place. That makes it quite possible that Trump’s victory tour will continue on Super Tuesday.
Predicting victories in upcoming primaries, Trump said: “It’s going to be an fantastic two months… we might not even need the two months”.
“We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old”. We won with highly educated.
Rubio indicated that if it comes down to a two horse race between himself and Trump, polls are putting him well out in front. We won with poorly educated.
This suggests that the Rubio-Cruz strategy of winning enough of the anti-Trump faction to be the single, clear alternative may be built on sand.
But even Trump had sought to temper expectations, saying with caucuses there are “always problems” and imploring the thousands of supporters who turned up at his caucus eve rally in Las Vegas to get out and vote.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Ohio Governor John Kasich were far behind. In fact, about 4 in 10 of them supported Trump.
Advertisement
The Nevada caucuses mark the first Republican contest in the West and the fourth of the campaign.
