The Establishment has made it clear it wants no "grass roots activists" interrupting the process to ensure the nomination of the candidate they select to run in November. Nevada is another example of their determination.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and the powerful Culinary Workers Union reportedly helped seal the deal for Hillary Clinton in her Saturday victory in Nevada's caucuses.
According to The Hill, Clinton dominated in caucuses held in six major casinos on the Las Vegas strip – helping to rack up a big majority in Clark County, where about three-quarters of the state's registered Democratic voters reside.
And it was carefully orchestrated by Reid – who got the Culinary Workers Union leader to get workers to turn up at the caucuses, The New York Times reports.
"He’s been extremely cooperative," Reid told the Times about union head D. Taylor.
Probably 100 organizers will be at the caucus sites and in hotels to make sure people know what they’re doing."
Hillary's win in Nevada was calculated and precise, finely tuned to muster the Establishment base.
What Hillary failed to do was win over a broad part of the rest of Nevada's voters; they went for Bernie.
Bernie Sanders may have fallen short against Hillary Clinton in Nevada today (Feb. 20), but there was a silver lining: The Vermont senator won 53% of the vote among Hispanic voters, in the first diverse state to hold its caucus, according to entrance polls.
Young voters were the difference: Sanders won 68% to 28% lead among minorities under 45 years old, showing that he resonates with millennials in Nevada, regardless of race, just as much as he did in New Hampshire and Iowa.
But, as FiveThirtyEight noted, Nevada’s voters are mostly old. And the support of millennials and the Latino community wasn’t enough to edge out Clinton, who won the Nevada Democratic caucus with 52% of the vote.
Clinton still has strong support among older Hispanic voters—a divide that was highlighted when Sanders supporters reportedly interrupted efforts by civil-rights leader Dolores Huerta, to provide Spanish translation at a rally at Harrahs casino.
Nevada, Sanders campaign senior adviser Tad Devine said during an MSNBC interview Thursday, “is a test.”
Devine has been upbeat about Sanders’ chances in Nevada for weeks, pointing to the matchup between the candidate’s income-inequality message and the devastating repercussions Nevadans experienced after the Great Recession. “We’ve been on TV there longer,” Devine told RCP last week. “We’ve had a very substantial presence there.”
With just two contests behind them, Clinton leads Sanders in the delegate count because of her backing from super delegates. The Sanders campaign team says it remains focused on expanding support from a wide demographic array of voters, demonstrating momentum state-by-state, and stoking his online fundraising haul, which has proven impressive for a candidate who does not host big-dollar fundraisers. The super delegates, they insist, are not their immediate concern.
But after Nevada, voters in 11 states fill out ballots March 1, known as Super Tuesday. The states are diverse in population and geographical locations. Another 857 pledged delegates – or more than 20 percent of the total – are up for grabs in the March 8 and March 15 contests among seven states, where Clinton has leads in polls. Later states in the West could favor Sanders.
Political analysts, including Mann, believe Sanders’ path to the nomination could be blocked any number of ways, including by super delegates who back the former first lady.
“If he proves to be more of a threat to Clinton, the full Democratic Party network will gear up to help defeat him,” Mann predicted. Why?
Because the Establishment Democratic party power brokers fear Sanders “would be a disaster in November.”
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