Trump Wins, Screams “I Love the Poorly Educated!”

24 Feb, 2016

Donald Trump triumphed in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday, in a resounding win that cemented his position as the Republican presidential frontrunner with a lead that could soon be unassailable.

The billionaire reality TV star has now won three of the four early nominating states, after other convincing wins in South Carolina and New Hampshire.

The Nevada result was called at 9pm local time by the Associated Press. By 2.30am, when all precincts had reported, Trump had a remarkable 45.9% of the vote.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, the two senators best placed to challenge Trump, battled it out for second place, with Rubio on 23.9% edging Cruz, who got 21.4%.

However, their race for second place was overshadowed by the magnitude of Trump’s victory, which exit polls indicated was predicated upon a sweep of virtually every single demographic in the state, including those previously considered loyal to his rivals.

At his Las Vegas victory party at the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, Trump described the diversity of his supporters. “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.”

He got the loudest applause when he pointed out exit polls that showed he won close to half the Latino vote. The exit data, from CNN, was based on a small sample of Latino voters, but it was nonetheless a surprising figure for a candidate who has called Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals”.

“Number one with Hispanics,” Trump said. “I’m really happy about that.”

The Republicans now look ahead to Super Tuesday on 1 March, when 11 states are due to hold contests that could have a decisive impact on the race.

Trump appears to have a lead in all the states in which recent surveys are available, except Arkansas and Texas, Cruz’s home state. In a sign of the breadth of his support, Trump is ahead of the pack in deeply conservative Super Tuesday states such as Alabama, Georgia and Alaska, and Democratic-leaning states such as Minnesota.

In Massachusetts, another left-leaning Super Tuesday state, Trump leads by 50 percentage points, according to a recent poll that put Rubio at 16%.

At an eve-of-caucuses rally in Las Vegas on Monday, one of Trump’s most extraordinary to date, the businessman appeared fearless and unencumbered by the normal rules of politics. He lampooned Cruz as “sick”, said that banned torture techniques did not go far enough, and reacted to a heckler by saying: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

Although the Republican race is still at an early phase, and Trump – with 81 delegates to Cruz and Rubio’s 17 each – is a long way off from the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the party’s nomination, he is now the clear and dominant frontrunner. That is partly due to a change in the nominating rules introduced by the Republican National Committee (RNC) following the long and drawn-out race of 2012 that Mitt Romney eventually won.

The 2016 nominating contest was truncated, meaning a candidate can now secure the party’s backing more quickly. In another rule change, designed to prevent GOP outsiders from mounting long-shot challenges, a nominee must score clear victories in at least eight states in order to be nominated at the convention as opposed to five states. That change is also likely to benefit Trump.

TheGuardian 

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