Bernie Sanders’ Nevada Win Makes Him the One to Beat for the Nomination

Bernie Sanders’ commanding win in Nevada dismantled the conventional wisdom about his level of appeal. It broadened his coalition to look more like the Democratic Party as a whole and will make it harder for fearful moderates to impede his path to the nomination. #BernieSanders #NevadaCaucuses

The knock on Sanders always has been that his energetic but narrow base -- young, mostly white, heavily male and largely disaffected -- would make it easy for President Donald Trump to roll over him come November.

Nevada suggested otherwise, as Sanders, 78, won support from Latinos, African-Americans, union workers, people without college educations and voters up to age 45. In Sanders’ view, that populist coalition is a mirror-image of Trump’s own but just as potent.

His double-digit win there also shows he can take pieces from the support of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, leaving them to split the anti-Sanders vote four ways -- or five, including Michael Bloomberg, who joins the balloting on Super Tuesday, March 3. Sanders already is eyeing a win Saturday in South Carolina, long thought to be Biden’s last redoubt.

“When we win South Carolina, I think it will be a bit of a major signal to the party about the fact that Bernie Sanders has brought together a coalition that is everything they thought he wasn’t, quite frankly,” Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said. “Something that is multiracial, multigenerational, expanding, bringing new people into it.”

(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

If February was prologue, March is the main event. Only 2.5% of the delegates needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in July have been awarded from the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Twenty-nine states vote between March 3 and March 17, awarding a total of 2,292 delegates -- 58% of the total -- making it possible to clinch the nomination by St. Patrick’s Day.

That might be a bit optimistic, even with Sanders’ momentum, but he is consolidating strength with every passing contest and soon may simply be out of reach of the others. That includes Bloomberg, who’s signaled he’s willing to spend another half-billion dollars on top of the first half-billion that’s already shown up on the airwaves.

In California, the most populous states that votes on Super Tuesday, Sanders is substantially ahead. He has less of an edge in North Carolina and Texas, and is tied with Bloomberg in the latest Virginia polling.

The Vermont senator is also polling above the 15% threshold in every March primary with reliable public polling, meaning he may be able to collect some delegates where others can’t.

“If the dynamics of the race did not dramatically change, Democrats could end up coming out of Super Tuesday with Bernie Sanders holding a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead,” says a state-of-the-race memo from Buttigieg’s campaign last week.

A similar missive from Bloomberg’s campaign said a 400-delegate lead for Sanders after Super Tuesday is a “likely insurmountable advantage.”

And a Feb. 11 memo from the Warren campaign estimated that Sanders is competitive in 161 of the 165 congressional districts voting on Super Tuesday. Biden is viable in 159; Warren in 108.

Those memos were written not to lionize Sanders but to shock the so-far fractious moderates into action or prepare to find that Sanders is the nominee.

Moderates can’t seem to decide, though, where to concentrate their stop-Bernie energy. Buttigieg took the prize in Iowa, Klobuchar got a look in New Hampshire, and Biden came closest to Sanders in Nevada, but none of them seems like the centrist favorite, in the way Sanders is the liberal one. Bloomberg hoped to wear that moderate mantle, but a widely criticized debate performance last week raised questions about his ability to play that role.

It’s also possible that Sanders’ can’t quite coalesce enough support to claim victory outright, opening up the possibility -- still slim -- of a convention floor fight to determine the nominee. This would occur if the others can keep Sanders from winning the 1,991 delegates necessary to win the nomination on the first ballot in Milwaukee in July.

That “brokered convention” scenario -- which last happened in 1952 -- could allow the party power brokers known as super-delegates to decide the party’s nominee.

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