Nevada Republican caucus 2016: news and updates

Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday dominance is further proof that the Republican Party is truly, profoundly broken.

Political parties, at their core, exist to do something simple: help their voters make good decisions. Politics is complex. No normal human being can understand everything from trade relations with China to nuclear deals with Iran to insurance-market regulation. Political parties are supposed to simplify those choices by directing us to politicians who share our values, our hopes, our dreams.

Donald Trump won the Nevada caucuses in a landslide Tuesday night. Now, the precise delegate count has to be worked out. But in early states, winning or losing one delegate in the final count has less effect on a campaign than having momentum going into the next round of primaries and caucuses — especially when the next round is the multistate “SEC primary” across 11 states (most of them Southern) on March 1.

And for non-candidates, being associated with a winning (or losing) campaign — or, say, mucking up yet another caucus — can have effects that last beyond the final vote tally. So even in a race with only five active Republican candidates, there’s still more than one winner and more than one loser — and some of the winners and losers weren’t running at all. Read on.

Donald Trump has won Tuesday’s Nevada caucuses in a blowout. The billionaire won about 46 percent of the vote — 22 points ahead of his closest competitor, Marco Rubio, who drew 24 percent. Ted Cruz came in third place in the state with around 21 percent, Ben Carson came in fourth with around 4.8, and John Kasich came in last with about 3.6 percent.

The victory will put Trump a bit further ahead in the delegate chase, which he currently leads by a large margin. But he won’t gain too much ground — Nevada only has 30 GOP delegates, and it allots them proportionally among all candidates who top 3.33 percent of the vote. The effect of that rule is that the first-place finisher will only end up getting a few more delegates than the second-place finisher — nowhere near the 50-delegate advantage Trump gained from his smaller win in South Carolina.