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Voting is Going Strong Today in South Carolina and Nevada
A primary and a caucus are being held today to separate the sheep from the goats. The Republican ticket for South Carolina will be decided in their primary while several of the candidates are holding their breath and are keeping their fingers crossed. If Super Tuesday, March 1, wasn’t straight ahead for all of them, at least two of the candidates might feel they should drop out now. Nevada is holding a caucus in a race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that all polls show is too close to call. Ray has all the facts to prepare you for whatever the results are. Join Ray now.
From the news desk of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, this is Ray Mossholder and this is Campaign 2016: South Carolina and Nevada vote today.
South Carolina and Nevada are the third and fourth states to cast their votes in primaries or caucuses. Nevada voters and voters in South Carolina are being counted today. A far heavier than usual voter turnout in South Carolina in great weather is exciting the whole state. Tonight we will know who the voters in South Carolina favor among the six remaining Republican candidates. Nevada will have caucused and by tonight the gambling state will have chosen Hillary or Bernie. Some of the candidates have much more to lose than others.
According to Reuters, Donald Trump has a twenty point lead over all other candidates in today’s South Carolina vote. Reuters is one of the two most respected polling companies nationally (the other being Yougov). If the Reuters poll has the rest of the pack right, tonight’s primary will end up with Ted Cruz receiving 17%, Marco Rubio receiving 11%, Doctor Ben Carson 10%, Jeb Bush 8% and John Kasich 2%. As good as they are, even Reuters can miss it with their polling, so the results of the night may be very different than what their poll shows. South Carolina is known as the Palmetto State. It has what is called an open primary. That means any registered voter can cast developed in either of the two parties primaries. At stake are 50 delegates. The winner tonight takes at least 29 of them. The other twenty-one delegates are awarded to the top candidate in each of the seven congressional districts. All of the delegates will go to the July 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland Ohio. South Carolina’s population is 4.8 million in forty-six counties.
If Trump wins the South Carolina vote he will be carrying strong momentum going into Super Tuesday, March 1, when a third of the delegates to the Republican convention will be chosen. If Jeb Bush and Doctor Ben Carson don’t do far better than expected with the voters of South Carolina, they will have very little reason to continue the race. Marco Rubio simply needs to place second or third and well above Jeb Bush to stay strongly in the running. John Kasich has said the South Carolina vote won’t matter to him. He plans to go on campaigning and expects Super Tuesday to be super for him. If they had the money to continue after a slap in the face from the voters of South Carolina, Bush and Carson may go as far as Super Tuesday too. This is former Republican candidate Lindsey Graham’s state, but he has already abandoned his candidacy.
Nevada began having caucuses in 2008. Before that they had primaries. Nevada’s caucuses begin with neighborhood meetings of Democrats who come together to elect delegates to the county, state and national conventions. Same day registration has been offered to new voters, or Republicans and independents who want to vote Democrat. Any eligible voter will be eighteen years old by Election day on November 8 can caucus. If you have ever driven in Nevada so that you went through the whole state, you know that there are miles and miles of vacant land and very few cities. Still there are about 250 caucus locations that will be active today. The state will award a total of forty-three delegates and three alternates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention being held in Philadelphia in July. Nevada is known for its extremely low voter turnout. That gives extra importance to those who show up and caucus. No matter how the vote turns out today in that state, Hillary Clinton already has three Superdelegates pledged to her. Just like Iowa, of flipping of a coin may actually decide the winner tonight because Clinton and Sanders are locked in an absolute dead heat.
The Pope has all but apologized to Donald Trump, saying that he was very much misunderstood about building walls by the interpreter in Mexico who must not have been able to handle the Pope’s Italian language all that well. The truth is, the Vatican has very high walls to protect it. Trump had said yesterday the Pope had undoubtedly been misquoted. He bore no ill will towards the Pope.
But the Donald had a very different reaction to Apple Inc. because that company refused to cooperate with the judges order to assist law enforcement in unlocking the iPhone of the shooter who killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, at a Christmas party in December. Trump called for a boycott of Apple. He said “Boycott them until they give up the information. The phone is owned by the government.” This situation may be solved by the clever judge who told Apple’s owner Tim Cook that all he had to do was make a break–in into the one phone the killer used and then whatever creation Cook came up with to do that could be destroyed.
Trump doesn’t seem to care who he verbally attacks. Proof enough of that is that he had negative words about Boeing, a company deeply liked by most South Carolinians. That’s either stupid or gutsy. But Trump was pointing out that Boeing opened its largest industrial investment in China last year. Since 2011 Boeing has been building its 787 Dreamliner in North Charleston and it employs about eight thousand people. Trump said “South Carolina has a beautiful plant built by Boeing. But if China cuts the value of its currency a couple of years from now, be careful that your nothing to lose it here.” He told his crowd that if he becomes President, that kind of thing won’t happen on his watch.
Once more Trump, echoed by Marco Rubio, called Ted Cruz a liar. In fact, the Donald said “Ted Cruz is the biggest liar I have ever seen”. I am working on an article right now that asks the question “Is Ted Cruz a liar?” It will be on Reach More Now YouTube and reachmorenow.com in a day or two.
Voting is Going Strong Today in South Carolina and Nevada
Voting is Going Strong Today in South Carolina and Nevada