(CNN) — Former US President Donald Trump will make his case to Republican voters in Nevada on Sunday as the front-runner for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination looks to solidify support in the state that votes third on the GOP nominating calendar.
Trump’s Sunday afternoon speech in Reno comes on the heels of campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, with a return trip to Iowa planned for Tuesday. The flurry of travel underscores an aggressive effort by Trump’s team to maintain his sizable polling lead a little over a month before the Iowa caucuses open the Republican nomination process.
Trump leads the GOP primary field by around 40 percentage points nationally, according to the latest update to the CNN Poll of Polls. In the new average, Trump holds 61% support to 17% for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and 11% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Ahead of his Nevada trip, Trump on Saturday doubled down on language condemned for its ties to White supremacist rhetoric, saying at a campaign event in New Hampshire that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The former president told the crowd that immigrants “from all over the world” are “pouring into the country,” reiterating a phrase he used previously that sparked outcry from the Anti-Defamation League earlier this year.
Trump on Saturday also quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack President Joe Biden as a “threat to democracy” and praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, two other foreign leaders with totalitarian tendencies.
Trump’s advisers have privately voiced concerns that his supporters could simply assume he has a comfortable advantage in the race and that they are not reliant on their votes.
“We are leading by a lot, but you have to go out and vote,” the former president told supporters Wednesday night in Coralville, Iowa.
Trump is also hoping to blunt any momentum his main rivals for the GOP nomination may have picked up in recent weeks. Haley, who returns to Iowa to campaign on Sunday, scored a key endorsement last week from Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation Republican primary. DeSantis, who is counting on a strong Iowa performance to boost his campaign, has shown a new aggressiveness to take on Trump over the past week, lobbing attacks during a CNN town hall on his record as president and his unpredictable rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the super PAC backing DeSantis, Never Back Down, is in turmoil after shedding a fourth senior official this month. Chief strategist Jeff Roe resigned Saturday over comments made by the key fundraising group’s chairman and interim CEO, Scott Wagner, relating to the high-profile departures of three other officials earlier in December.
DeSantis and Trump will be among several Republican candidates competing in Nevada’s party-run caucuses on February 8. Haley opted for the state-run presidential primary on February 6. But only the caucuses will be used to determine the allocation of delegates to next year’s Republican convention.
Trump’s stop in Reno also comes days after a Nevada grand jury indicted six people who had acted as fake electors in a scheme intended to overturn Biden’s 2020 election win. Trump himself has been criminally charged over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and continues to falsely claim the election was stolen from him and spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
A federal judge overseeing Trump’s 2020 election interference case last week temporarily paused all procedural deadlines, which could delay the start of his March trial. The development was a welcome one for Trump and his legal team, who have been pushing to delay proceedings until after the November election.
The election interference case is one of several in which Trump is a defendant. He faces 91 criminal charges across four separate cases and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
CNN’s Kit Maher, Jeff Zeleny, Aaron Pellish and Steve Contorno contributed to this report.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Trump’s bid to solidify support in early voting states continues with visit to Nevada.”
