Could Nevada’s Republican presidential primary be – gasp! – meaningful?

This week the Nevada State Republican Party, Fake Elector Michael McDonald, proprietor, announced it has set a Feb. 8 date for its presidential preference caucus. 

Under Nevada law, the state must hold a Republican presidential preference primary two days earlier, on Feb. 6 – provided two or more candidates file with the secretary of state’s office to be on the ballot.

Two or more candidates will. There is no fee under state law to file as a candidate for the primary, and colorful characters always come out of the woodwork.

But it might not be just gadflies and pranksters. 

Nevada’s not only the third state on the primary/caucus calendar. It’s also the only early state where the caucus will be administered by one of Trump’s fake electors, a group that was crucial to Trump’s unsuccessful plot to get Mike Pence to overthrow the 2020 election results.

Pence may not be eager to pay the Nevada caucus filing fee – McDonald’s reportedly charging an exorbitant $55,000 – to participate in a private-sector caucus run by an election denier whose impersonation of a presidential elector culminated in a violent mob ransacking the Capitol while chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”

And Pence might not be the only one. Anti-Trump candidates Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson – and other, less outspoken candidates – might also want nothing to do with a McDonald-run caucus.

The Pence, Christie, and Hutchinson campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

There’s a chance that by Nevada’s caucus/primary, all those campaigns could be kaput. 

And there’s a chance one or all of them won’t be.

And what of Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, and any other Republican candidates who might still be hanging around by February, if only in the faint hope that Republican voters somehow, someday start tiring of Trump? Filing deadlines for both the caucus and the primary are in mid-October. 

Two months can be a long time in campaigns. By then they too might be more attracted to the state-run primary than a circus where the ringleader is one of Trump’s chronically sycophantic fake electors.

A McDonald minion told CNN that any candidate who files for the primary will not be allowed to participate in the caucus.

But McDonald’s entire point of holding a caucus rather than a primary is widely believed to be deliberately giving an advantage to McDonald’s dear leader, Trump. How intriguing would it be if the entire Republican field, including Ron DeSantis, said with Trump under indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election, participating in a caucus run by McDonald, a credibility-free election denier, was unacceptable.

What if instead they all filed for the primary, and then chided Trump for refusing to participate in a primary that would be sure to attract multiple times as many voters as a caucus ever could or would?

The state party can determine how its delegates to the national convention are selected. McDonald and company can simply ignore the results of a Nevada primary, whoever wins it.

But the national media wouldn’t ignore it.

McDonald and his party could sue (again) in an attempt to thwart the primary. What better way to honor Trump than giving money to lawyers?

But hopefully such a suit, like most of McDonald’s courtroom ventures (the exception being the handsome cash award he won late in the 20th century in a personal injury suit after an accident at a movie theater), would fizzle in courts.

Locally unpopular though it may be to say out loud, Nevada’s early spot in the presidential caucus-primary lineup has never mattered much or garnered media attention comparable to other early states. It’s why Nevada is not attracting presidential candidates now. 

A primary effectively boycotted by Trump might be goofy enough to get Nevada’s presidential selection process more attention than a lame, lightly attended, fixed-for-Trump caucus ever would. It might attract more national attention than any Nevada presidential caucus, for either party, ever has.

It might mean something for a change.

That might be especially true if Trump has already won both Iowa and New Hampshire. Nevada’s dumb caucus would be a mere formality at that point. A primary, by contrast, especially Trumpless, would be a shiny object the national media would not be able to resist.

And if Trump stays loyal (broken clock twice a day) to McDonald, and sticks with the caucus while everybody else bolts to the primary, whoever wins the primary would be able to call themself, well, an early primary winner. They could take that title, asterisked though it may be, to the next – and politically far more important – contest, South Carolina.

Alas, the most likely scenario may be the most banal one:

• Presidential candidates, or what’s left of them by the October filing periods, will either file for the caucus only, or just skip the state entirely.
• Come February, a bunch of Republican voters who didn’t get the memo will proceed to vote in the primary and discover the ballot doesn’t include Trump or DeSantis or any other recognizable candidates, just a bunch of names they’ve never heard of, and then probably accuse Democrats of leaving Trump’s name off the ballot as part of a deep state conspiracy.
• Trump will win Nevada’s caucus handily.
• And the only notable or memorable thing about Nevada’s role in the process of selecting the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will be the chaotic confusion wrought by a petulant Nevada State Republican Party and its serial anti-democracy buffoonery.

The chaotic confusion is probably a done deal under every scenario. 

But the chaos notwithstanding, if Nevada’s super lucky – and it would be dumb luck, not planning – and if DeSantis and other candidates locate spines, skip the caucus, and file for the primary, a Nevada contest could be interesting, and possibly even meaningful.

Probably not though.