Nevada GOP binds delegates to Trump

PAHRUMP — The Nevada Republican Central Committee voted to bind the state’s 22 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Charlotte to President Donald Trump during a Saturday confab in Pahrump. The voice vote was unanimous.

Directly after the vote, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale proclaimed that the GOP is united. “There are not factions anymore. This is the party of Trump,” he said.

In August, with the blessing of the Trump team, Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald proposed having the central committee nominate Trump, as an incumbent running for a second term, rather than hold caucuses.

Three other states — Arizona, Kansas and South Carolina — also eliminated their caucuses this year. Arizona Democrats didn’t caucus in 2012 when President Barack Obama ran for re-election.

One participant at the meeting spoke against the McDonald rule.

The move saved the party money and cut off an opportunity for mischief for Trump’s long-shot GOP challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who garnered one delegate in Iowa and zero in New Hampshire. Thus far, Trump has accumulated 61 delegates, and Saturday’s Nevada vote adds 22 more to his total.

Chuck Muth, a Nevada GOP happy warrior, told the Review-Journal that he had re-registered as a Democrat last weekend and voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as his first choice.

“It was kind of a way of demonstrating how absurd I think it is to have same-day registration as well as early voting for a caucus. So my wife and I last Sunday went to an early voting site, we changed parties right there on the spot. We caucused for Bernie,” Muth said.

Muth explained that he chose Sanders because he thought a contest between Trump and the Vermont senator would provide “a great civics lesson for the entire country comparing an absolute avowed socialist versus an absolute avowed capitalist.”

He knows other Republicans who have done likewise.

The central committee also voted to censure “Willard Mitt Romney,” the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump during the impeachment trial. During a voice vote, the ayes prevailed; only one person voted no.

Parscale predicted Trump would win Nevada in 2020, despite his 2.4 percentage point loss to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a blue wave that saw Democrats win all but one statewide office in 2018.

Parscale joked that if Pahrump dropped its first three three letters and added a T, “Then the president would be visiting here all the time.”

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.