Members of the Nevada Republican Party gather in Pahrump NV for a central committee meeting Saturday, Feb 22, 2020. Party members vote on binding their delegates for the Republican National Convention to President Trump and his campaign.
Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.
PAHRUMP — On the same day that Democrats across the state were helping to choose their party’s presidential nominee, Elizabeth Herring sat in the back of the ballroom of the Pahrump Nugget and smiled as Nevada Republicans in the room cheered for four more years of President Donald Trump.
Herring said she remembered while growing up how some of the best-paying jobs in the country were in the automotive, mining and steel industries. Those jobs have all since left the country, she said.
She believes past presidential administrations have ignored the American middle class, and that Trump is the only president in years to do something about it.
“For me, he’s a man that actually understands what middle-class Americans have been up against for the last 40 or 50 years,” she said. “He’s the first president to realize that and act on that and actually verbalize it out loud.”
The national spotlight has focused on Nevada Democrats this weekend as the party wrapped up its 2020 presidential caucuses. Meanwhile on a dreary, wet Saturday in Pahrump, members of the Nevada Republican Central Committee gathered in the back ballroom of the Nugget and voted to endorse and bind their delegates to Trump at the Republican National Convention.
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The vote was met with a standing ovation and chants repeating “Trump” and “Keep America Great,” an amendment to the president’s typical campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Only one voice in the room dissented, saying that Republicans not having a caucus was the “wrong thing to do” and that the party should be willing to engage all Republican candidates challenging Trump. The dissenter declined to be interviewed.
Late last year, Nevada Republicans were the first in a series of other states to vote to cancel the party’s presidential nominating contests, based on the conclusion that Trump would get all the delegates at the national convention in Charlotte, N.C., anyway. Canceling those contests ensures that voters do not have the chance to vote for a different candidate for the nomination.
Michael MacDonald, who has served as chairman of the state GOP since 2012, told the Associated Press in September that it would be “malpractice” to spend money on a caucus when the results of the race were inevitable.
Republicans in Arizona, Hawaii, Alaska, Kansas and South Carolina canceled their nominating contests as well. Republicans in Georgia, Minnesota and Wisconsin refused to list any candidate other than Trump on their state’s primary ballot, even though there have been other challengers for the nomination, including former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former congressman and conservative talk show host Joe Walsh, former U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford and businessman and perennial candidate Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente. Walsh and Sanford have since dropped out. In Iowa, Trump was the first incumbent in decades to lose a delegate to another candidate, losing one of the state’s 40 delegates to Weld.
Minnesota’s Trump-only Republican ballot faced a legal challenge but the suit was ultimately struck down in January by the state Supreme Court.
After Saturday’s vote, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, addressed the crowd, touting the Republican Party for being united, while the Democratic Party was in “chaos.”
“There’s so much at stake in this election,” he said. “In 2016, a lot of people said we won the fight. I’ve always said that wasn’t the end of the fight, that was the start of the fight.”
Parscale emphasized that the fight wouldn’t end at re-election, and that the campaign was looking to win blue states like California and New York as well.
Isabella Arrington, 16, carried a Latinos For Trump sign at the event. As the daughter of a Mexican-American immigrant, she said she believed most young people had it all wrong when it came to Trump.
“People my age sort of have a bias that he is bad and make all their assumptions based on what they hear,” she said.
Her mother, Cherlyn Arrington, who is running for Assembly District 21, said her husband came to the United States legally and was also a Trump supporter.
“They came here for a better America, not another socialist country,” she said.
Also at the event was conservative political activist Chuck Muth, who likes to sling business cards from a pink Hello Kitty wallet as a “conversation starter.” The former Clark County Republican Party Chairman and onetime Nevada Republican Party executive director said he came to watch the vote after stirring up some trouble by caucusing for Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I was thinking about switching back to Republican but I got so much hate male from Democrats that were mad at me that now I think I’m going to stay a Democrat and start ‘Democrats for Trump.’ ”
Make no mistake, Muth does not support any of Sanders’ policies, characterizing him as a socialist. Rather, Muth believes that a race between Trump and the Vermont senator would be a good “lesson” for American youths, whom he believes don’t actually understand what socialism means.
“I think that Trump is going to beat any of the Democrat nominees,” Muth said. “But with Bernie Sanders, we are going to have such a clear contrast between a devout socialist and a devout capitalist, and I think it’s going to be a wonderful lesson for the entire country next fall.”
