The NPR Politics Podcast - Why Nevada Has A Primary AND A Caucus Next Week

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Republican voters in Iowa have two presidential nominating contests next week, a primary on Tuesday and a caucus on Thursday. We explain why. This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Molly in Minnewaska State Park in New York. I'm currently skiing through a veritable winter wonderland. This podcast was recorded at 1.04 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, February 1st, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I hope there'll still be great snow cover on these cross-country tails. Enjoy the show! Could not be me. So many athletic listeners. When are we going to have somebody, like, snacking when they call in?

That's what I want to hear. But good for you for the skiing. Either of you good skiers? No. Not since high school. I learned how to ski when I was 38. Isn't that crazy? Wow.

Are you a good skier now? No. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

There are three presidential nominating contests in the next week. On Saturday, Democrats will vote in South Carolina. Nevada is holding its presidential primaries on February 6th. And Democrats have one, Republicans have one, and then the state Republican Party is having its own caucus two days later. Why are there these two different things for Republicans and which one really matters? Well, the caucus is what is going to be the thing that gives out any delegates. And that's a party-run affair. The party decided to hold it on February 8th. They did not like that the Democrats in the state, the governor at the time in 2021, signed laws into effect saying that they wanted to make the process a primary and that they wanted to make voting more easy in the state. Things like longer early voting times, more mail-in ballots, for example.

But the primary process, they feel, is a little bit more inclusive, less exclusionary, less arduous. The party protested that and said, no, no, no, we're going to hold our caucus on our, who, of course, is running for the Republican nomination, knew from the start that she was going to be in a contest where there was no incentive to win if her name was on the primary ballot. Why? What does she get out of this? It could give her her campaign at least the illusion of some juice, right? Like if she wins a primary, she gets to say she won an election, even though she's not getting any of those delegates, as Domenico mentioned. And I think there was an effort from presidential candidates to kind of cooperate with the state-run primary and be a part of that. And especially since, you know, the Trump campaign had sort of like, you know, had a lot of influence over the Nevada GOP and their sort of caucus process. So for Nikki Haley, even though she's not going to get any delegates, which is what matters,

this at least gives her campaign something to sort of say in terms of like, hey, we won. We won something. So Trump won't even be on the primary ballot. That's right. Right. And the Nevada Republican Party chairman, Michael McDonald, he's made no secret, right, of who he supports here. February 8th, you come out to your location. You sit with your neighbors and tell them how great Donald Trump is. And then you cast your ballot for Donald J. Trump.

On the 6th, the state is going to be holding its primary. This is the state-run primary. And then two days later on the 8th, which is a Thursday, that's when the Republican, the Nevada Republican Party is going to hold its presidential caucus, which is just to divvy out the delegates. And this is just so wild because like usually state parties don't get involved in a primary. This is just like a very weird thing. Right. And, you know, a closed primary, which is only Republicans or only Democrats that can participate where, you know, we saw in New Hampshire, for example, it was a semi-open primary where independents could vote and why Nikki Haley thinks that Pence and Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, because they weren't able to take themselves off the ballot before they dropped out of the race.

But Haley's going to be on the primary ballot, but not on the caucus ballot, not because she protested, but because the state party trying to flex its muscles with these candidates said, if you participate in that primary, you're barred from being on our caucus ballot. I do want to talk quickly about South Carolina. Democrats there vote on Saturday. Of course, South Carolina Republicans will vote at the end of the month, and that's getting a lot more attention. But does the Democratic primary in South Carolina matter? Well, I do think that this is the start officially of the Democratic nominating process.

New Hampshire was this rogue entity really because remember there was talk about internal party drama that is reflected on the Democratic side in South Carolina and New Hampshire because New Hampshire has gone first for a long time and the President Biden wanted to have South Carolina go first. one, to mix it up, but also because he was propelled to the nomination by voters in South Carolina after he lost in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020. So he wanted to kind of give them a little bit of a reward. There was a bit of a backlash toward that. But this is the first time we're going to see Biden's name actually on the ballot against – Dean Phillips is still on this, the congressman from Minnesota

who got about 20% in New Hampshire, and Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who's run previously and finished far behind in New Hampshire. President Biden and Democratic Party national leaders have wanted to elevate the South Carolina primary because it is more diverse, more representative of the Democratic voting base. What do you expect to see in that regard? Yeah. And for President Biden, you know, remember that he was really propelled to the nomination by one key piece of his base, and that was black voters. 60% of South Carolina voters in a Democratic primary traditionally have been black voters. So,

you know, Biden is trying to elevate this group, show, you know, give more of a reward for basically helping him win the presidency. But one thing that it does highlight is this rift that Biden has seen between younger black voters and older black voters. And older black voters, those over 45 in the NPR, PBS, NewsHour-Marist poll, 77 percent said that they approve of the job that Biden is doing. But for those under 45, it's just 54 percent. So a big gap there. And, you know, Biden certainly needs younger voters, especially younger voters of color, to be fired up for his reelection. We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be back in just a moment. And we're back. Domenico, we always like to talk about money. It tells us a lot about what's going on. What are we seeing when it comes to spending in these upcoming primaries? Well, not much in Nevada. There's been only about a million dollars spent over the past year in Nevada on that contest, if you look at the Republican contest in South Carolina, for example, four times that has been spent in the past week in the state. And South Carolina hasn't even seen the biggest amount of spending of any of these states. You know, Iowa, $125 million was spent. New Hampshire, $80 million was spent. So really not a lot of attention being put on Nevada whatsoever. Now, we've mentioned earlier that President Biden wanted to elevate South Carolina in the

democratic process, in part because of the state's demographics. On the other hand, I'm wondering about Nevada. The Republican Party, of course, is an overwhelmingly white party nationwide. But in Nevada, Latinos are a significant part of the electorate. Is the Trump campaign doing anything to reach out to that voting bloc? Well, I mean, Republicans in general have been trying to court Latino voters, and Nevada is like a big part of their strategy. They created these like community centers were supposed to be outreach centers in mostly Latino and Black neighborhoods, like a sort of a space for the GOP to be visible in these communities. I will say a lot of them have closed. There have been reports that they've closed in recent months. But I think there are plans to reopen, especially community centers in Nevada

specifically. But I mean, in terms of like, you know, what the Trump campaign has been messaging to these voters, not a lot has changed. I mean, it's just mostly that Democrats have been sort of underperforming specifically with like young Latino men. Right. Which is very interesting that young men of color seem to be such a problem area for for Joe Biden moving into this election year, but almost like a swing voting block. Yeah, it's interesting. Well, and I mean, it's interesting because like this is a group that doesn't vote, at least Latinos in general, like young Latinas have much higher voter participation than young men.

There's a whole that's like a whole other thing. But I do think it's going to be interesting to watch to see how Republicans do. I think the economy is going to be a big part of their strategy to try to get some of those voters to their side. But in general, polling has suggested that there's not like this big swing of their strategy to try to get some of those voters to their side. But in general, polling has suggested that there's not like this big swing of Latinos to the Republican Party, even in Nevada. It's just sort of like Democrats are definitely underperforming. At the margins, it certainly matters quite a bit. You know, notably in the Republican Party,

it's overwhelmingly white. And in a lot of these states, we've seen that. But Nevada is slightly different. I mean, in the Nevada 2016 caucus for Republicans, Latinos were 8% of the population that went to vote for Republicans. So that's not an insignificant number. You know, it's a little less, obviously, than what we saw nationally, which was 13% and 17% in Nevada itself in a general election. so quite significant. And of course, Nevada is an important state, not just in the primary, maybe not that much in the primary, to be quite frank, but in the general election, it's an important state. All of this sounds pretty chaotic, this primary slash caucus situation. What might that mean for the Nevada GOP going forward?

Well, the state party is a mess. I mean, I don't know what other way to kind of put it. Maybe that's the word of the 2024 elections. But it is, you know, for Trump at this point, the former state party executive director went to work for the Trump campaign. We already talked about what the state chairman has been doing. But really, state parties are not supposed to be about promoting any one particular candidate when that person's not the president at the time. But it's supposed to be about door knocking, about activism, about getting out the vote, having enough money to have those

kinds of processes so that when a presidential campaign or a gubernatorial campaign or congressional campaign comes through, you have a database of voters to say, here are the people that we know want to vote for us and have voted for us. And we have their names, their contacts. Let us know what you need. Right now, the Nevada State Party is just not that very well funded or organized. And I'm pretty keyed into how parties talk about voting, like the sort of nuts and bolts of voting in particular.

And I have found the way that the Nevada GOP has talked about the primary to be pretty interesting, not just sort of raising concerns about ballot by mail, you know, mail-in voting in general. But, you know, they have called this primary meaningless and have basically like raised a lot of legitimacy questions about, you know, how the state runs elections. And the thing is, is like they're going to need their voters to embrace mail-in voting come November. Right. And the RNC knows this. They had they have a campaign going on that's it's called Bank Your Vote. Like they're spending money to like make sure that their voters get more comfortable with the idea of voting early in person and by mail, because, you know, this is like you getting killed in the early vote. It can cost you like like Domenico said in the margins, things matter. So I just think it's really interesting how the Nevada state party has decided to even just like

message to their voters how they should feel about voting in Nevada's elections. Well, I think it goes to this larger problem that the Republican Party has, which is that this kind of like blow up the system messaging. It might work in the primary, but it becomes a real problem when you're trying to turn out people in a general election and have any kind of faith in the result. Absolutely. Well, that's the show for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.