Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to a cheering crowd after winning the Nevada democratic caucus in Las Vegas, Nevada on Feb. 20, 2016.JOSH EDELSON/AFP / Getty Images
Hillary Clinton's win in heavily Hispanic Nevada dealt a serious blow to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders's leftist insurgency and restored the Democratic Party establishment elite's expectation of a stately march to the nomination for the former first lady.
"I am so thrilled and so grateful," she told cheering throngs of casino workers on Saturday, many of them given time off to vote in a carefully orchestrated effort to get registered Democrats to polls led by the powerful Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a staunch Clinton ally.
Ms. Clinton's margin of victory in Nevada was a relatively narrow five percentage points, but the win punctured the Sanders myth that his movement was gaining momentum. Ms. Clinton won handily in the 22 heavily Hispanic precincts clustered in Las Vegas.
With South Carolina – where half the Democratic voters are African-Americans – the next stop on the party's primary calendar, Mr. Sanders faces an even tougher challenge proving his appeal reaches beyond young, overwhelmingly white voters.
Mr. Sanders is sticking to his tune, that even close losses will be good losses to keep his improbable campaign for the Democratic nomination alive until the summer.
"We have come a very long way in nine months," he said after losing in Nevada. "The wind is at our backs. We have the momentum and I believe that when Democrats assemble in Philadelphia in July at that convention, we are going to see … one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States."
On Sunday, Ms. Clinton admitted that people still had doubts about her motivation. "There's an underlying question that maybe is really in the back of people's minds and that is, 'Is she in it for us or is she in it for herself?'" she said on CNN's State of the Union. "I'm going to demonstrate that I've always been the same person, I've always been fighting for the same values, fighting to make a difference in people's lives, long before I was in elected office, even before my husband was in the presidency," Ms. Clinton said of her bid to return to the White House.
After only three states – Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada – Mr. Sanders seems in a virtual tie with Ms. Clinton. Both have won 51 elected delegates. But the Democratic Party has roughly 712 so-called superdelegates (members of Congress, senior party officials, state governors, former presidents including Bill Clinton) who form 15 per cent of the total; and the vast majority of those pledging so far are backing Ms. Clinton. Her lead over Mr. Sanders in superdelegates is 449 to 19.
After South Carolina, there will be 28 states assigning nearly half the elected delegates in March, many of them big, diverse states where African-Americans and Hispanic voters form significant blocs of the vote. If Ms. Clinton continues to demonstrate a solid hold on minority voters, Mr. Sanders's campaign may be over long before July.
Other than his home state of "Vermont, I don't see a single state where Hillary Clinton is going to lose in a blowout," said David Plouffe, who put together President Barack Obama's winning campaigns and is now a Clinton supporter. "I see a lot of states where Hillary Clinton will probably win by a lot, and that equals real delegate yield."
The Sanders campaign insists it will prevail. "Once we get past March 1, the calendar changes dramatically," said Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for the Vermont senator and self-described socialist who, until recently, was officially an Independent. "It's frontloaded for her, but we have the ability to stay in the long game."
Nevada was "a bad day for Sanders," David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina told Reuters. "He needs to find a way to cut into Clinton's base, and I don't think he is going to find it here."
In an e-mail, Mr. Sanders warned his young army of supporters to be ready for an "over-the-top response from the millionaires and billionaires who want to stop our campaign to transform America."
He insisted there was "a path to victory for our political revolution. If we continue to stand together, we'll continue to win," and he signed off: "In solidarity."