LAS VEGAS (TIP): Riding on voters’ anger wave, Donald Trump scored his third consecutive victory in the Nevada caucuses to cement his frontrunner status in the Republican presidential race with his rivals failing miserably to arrest his winning streak.
“We will be celebrating for a long time tonight,” he said, add that a prediction that he’ll soon claim the GOP nomination.
“It’s going to be an amazing two months,” he said. “We might not even need the two months, folks, to be honest.”
“If you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much, and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” Trump said at a victory rally in Las Vegas. “Soon, the country is going to start winning, winning, winning.”
Trump vowed to keep the open the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, telling supporters: “We’re going to load it up with a lot of bad dudes out there.”
To the chagrin of the establishment, the real estate mogul won with a huge margin garnering about 45.9 percent of the total vote in Tuesday night’s fourth nomination contest with his two main rivals Marco Rubio at 23.9 and Ted Cruz at 21.4 percent together falling short of his vote share.
Marco Rubio elbowed out Ted Cruz for second place, far ahead of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who was endorsed by the New York Times for the GOP nomination, and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.
While more than 1,200 are needed to secure the Republican presidential nomination, Trump has a formidable head start.
The Washington Post attributed his victory to “an angry electorate hungry for a political outsider in the White House.”
The billionaire mogul “used visceral rhetoric to tap into anxieties about the economy, terrorism and illegal immigration,” it suggested even as it acknowledged the “staggering breadth” of Trump’s support.
The Nevada results demonstrated the power of Trump’s appeal in this anti-establishment year, said CNN.
In the Democratic race, front-runner Hillary Clinton was looking for a commanding victory over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s South Carolina primary to give her a boost heading into Super Tuesday.
Polls show the former secretary of state with a huge advantage among African-Americans which bodes well for her prospects in South Carolina and then the Southern states which vote on Super Tuesday where blacks make up a large segment of the Democratic primary electorate.