Buoyed by the support of enthusiastic workers in the city’s big casinos, Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, thwarting his momentum and proving to an anxious Democratic Party that she maintains strong support among minority voters that she can carry into a general election.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign breathed a sign of relief on Saturday as the results of the often-unpredictable campaign began to roll in. At a caucus at the famed Caesar’s Palace, blackjack dealers, pit bosses, cooks and housekeepers excitedly declared their support for the former secretary of state.
Mrs. Clinton had for months considered Nevada a safe haven that would provide a welcome shift from the mostly white electorates of New Hampshire and Iowa. But in recent weeks, Mr. Sanders’s populist message began to take hold and polls showed the two Democrats in a statistical dead heat. Her campaign, bracing for another loss, seemed to look beyond Nevada to the contest next weekend in South Carolina.
Clinton's victory sets her back on track before next week's South Carolina primary, where she has a commanding lead in recent polls. And it validates the Clinton campaign's theory of the race: that Sanders's appeal might be strong in largely-white states, but that Clinton is the candidate of the Democrats' nonwhite base.
Clinton is likely to win only a couple more delegates out of the state than Sanders, thanks to Nevada's model of assigning delegates regionally. But Clinton doesn't have to worry about delegate math just yet, because she's just won an important victory that makes clear she's still the frontrunner in this campaign.
Clinton was long thought to be the Democrats' inevitable nominee, but her performance in the first two states to vote fell far short of what she might have hoped for. She barely managed to pull out a tie with Sanders in Iowa, lost badly to him in New Hampshire, and national polls in the past week have been tightening.
So Clinton really needed a decisive win. She wanted to prove she could fight off the Sanders surge and give her campaign some sense of momentum before South Carolina and the first multi-state "Super Tuesday" primary on March 1st.
And that's just what she ended up getting. The Nevada results were the first test of how real Sanders's momentum was: in other words, how well he would be able to use his early victories as an opportunity to appeal to voters who hadn't been following the race closely for months.
In the end, then, the Nevada results provide ammunition for the Clinton campaign's argument that Sanders's early strength is a fluke of rural white states where he's camped out for months — and that it wouldn't easily translate to the rest of the country.
It's possible that the Clinton campaign didn't have much to worry about in Nevada at all, and recent polls showing a tied race were flukes (Nevada is notoriously difficult to poll). Or it's possible that the Clinton campaign's efforts to pull out all the stops in the last days before the caucuses worked, and managed to get enough supporters to the polls to fight off a Sanders surge.
Either way, the Clinton campaign has demonstrated that it does in fact know what it is doing — and Sanders will have to find another opportunity to show that he's broadening his appeal
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