Feb 8 (Reuters) Donald Trump won Republican presidential nomination caucuses in Nevada and the U.S. Virgin Islands on Thursday, moving closer to becoming his party’s White House standard-bearer in a likely general election rematch with U.S. President Joe Biden in November.
Trump, the frontrunner in his party’s nominating process, was the only major candidate running in Nevada’s caucuses and was likely to win the state’s 26 delegates to the party’s nominating convention in July after being projected as the winner on Thursday night by Edison Research.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump comfortably won the U.S. Virgin Islands caucuses, adding four to his delegate count. The former U.S. president got 182 votes, or 74% of the 246 ballots cast there, beating his final remaining challenger in the Republican contest, Nikki Haley, who won 26% support with 64 votes.
The Nevada caucuses, staged by the Trump-friendly Nevada Republican Party, came two days after a state-run primary election, which saw a humiliating defeat for Haley.
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Despite being the only major candidate on Tuesday’s Republican primary ballot, Haley was nonetheless roundly beaten as tens of thousands of Trump fans showed out to mark their ballots with “none of these candidates,” an option that earned 63% of the vote to Haley’s 30%.
Trump spent Thursday morning watching coverage of proceedings in a case he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court about Colorado’s decision to remove him from this year’s ballot for engaging in “insurrection,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The judges sounded wary of Colorado’s actions, expressing concern about the precedent it could set.
Speaking to reporters before he departed Florida for Nevada, Trump termed the Colorado case “more election interference by the Democrats.”
After his win, Trump appeared before fans in Las Vegas.
“I want to thank the great people of Nevada,” he remarked to cheers. He called Thursday’s Supreme Court arguments “a beautiful sight to watch.”.

Trump is close to capturing the Republican nomination after back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire last month.
Haley, a former U.N. ambassador, is refusing to abandon the nomination campaign, a move that has enraged Trump. Haley is promising to continue in the campaign and make a potential last stand in her home state of South Carolina, which has a primary election on Feb. 24.
Haley has no obvious path to the nomination and trails Trump severely in opinion polls in South Carolina, where she was governor for six years.

The competing Republican ballots in Nevada this week were the result of a clash between the state Republican Party, run by Trump backers, and a 2021 state law that dictates a primary must be held.
Presidential nominating caucuses are administered by state political parties, not the state, and the Nevada Republican Party elected to stay with a caucus on Thursday. It was considered more advantageous to Trump because of his superior ground game in the Western state.

Haley elected to compete in Tuesday’s primary. Trump headed for the caucus. The state party ruled that only candidates contesting Thursday’s caucus could fight for delegates.
Despite the results of Nevada having minimal impact on the Republican nominating race, the state will be a hotly contested battlefield because its population can swing to either party and play a large role in November’s presidential election.

In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Nevada by 2.4 percentage points. Opinion surveys show a possible rematch between Biden and Trump in the state will be tight.
About 30% of Nevada’s population is self-described as Latino or Hispanic on the U.S. Census, and Republicans are making some inroads with these voters nationwide.
Nevada also has numerous possible swing voters: there are 768,000 registered as “nonpartisan,” more than those registered as either Democrat or Republican, according to the latest state numbers.