No fools, but it is a bit disingenuous of a spin. No, he was trying to get a narrow victory and it was not an unreasonable goal for him.
Nevada caucus participation is a very light affair. This was the chance to provide support for the theory that he will create the grassroots excitement to get voters out. I do not know what the final voter turnout was compared to 2008 but if it was big it went more for her.
Now you can spin it that she has the superior ground game that has been working it longer and harder … but she has that everywhere else too. If he cannot pull off a win in this diverse state where only a little excitement in his demographics could be leveraged into outsized impact, then what chance does he have in other diverse states?
She was up by double digits in polls all of last year, even as late as the last week of December. Now Hillary beating Bernie by about 5 points is hardly a victory for her to be proud of, especially since the delegate allocation is only going to be so close.
ETA: And I say this as a tenuous Hillary supporter.
If Hillary was counting on polls from a year ago before anyone starting really campaigning and just before the steady drip of email scandal, then she would have been pretty stupid.
Looking back, a decent performance by Sanders, but from my reading (mostly following Nate Silver), this isn’t enough for him to be on track towards a possible victory. To win, Sanders needs to win states like Nevada (and most states in the Northeast), and be very competitive in states like SC and the rest of the South, while also picking up some big states in the Midwest and West.
Right now, that doesn’t seem so likely – what seems likely right now to me is that Hillary wins big in SC, wins big in most of the states of Super Tuesday, and has a very large delegate lead, along with momentum, into mid March and April.
And also in line with the overall population demographics. So we have a sample that pretty closely reflects the potential Nov electorate. Sweet. Now we just need to see the results.
I love crunchy data in the morning. Smells like predictive power.
Eh, I’ll not make any strong predictions, but this hurts Bernie. We already pretty much know without a “titanic” shift, that Hillary will win almost all of the SEC states (excluding maybe Kentucky and Tennessee which aren’t disproportionately black like the rest of the SEC–I know of no polling in those states either) a lot of these states have their elections on Super Tuesday or sometime in March. Not only that, but she will likely win those states by double digit margins. However, Bernie is going to lock up very white states–now unfortunately for Bernie, in the Democratic primary electorate, there aren’t as many lily white state delegates as there are deep south delegates. But still, we’re talking Wisconsin, Massachusetts, the rest of New England, Minnesota, some of the Big Sky country states etc (albeit lots of these are low population and thus lower delegate states, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Massachusetts are good prizes.)
For Bernie to win he needs to win the states that “aren’t lily white, but aren’t disproportionately black”, that makes up a lot of big states–Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York etc. Those states are big and diverse, but their democratic primary makeup isn’t as black as the deep south states. Well, Nevada, at 65% white, 15% black and 15% latino (as per the 2008 exit poll–these numbers are talking about demographics of the Democratic electorate) is very representative of these states. If Bernie goes on to lose those states by 3-5%, and the deep south states (and other high black % states like Michigan) by 20%+ he’s done by mid-March, Hillary will have such a big delegate lead people just won’t be talking about Bernie anymore. His die hards will hang around but no campaign is 100% diehards.
Hillary and Obama kept going well after March because delegate and state wise they basically tied “super tuesday”, but that’s just very likely not going to happen here. If Hillary is going to hold her massive leads in the deep south, and she can grind out 3-5% wins in “moderately diverse states” like this one, Bernie just has no mathematical path to the nomination.
Additionally let’s not paint this as Bernie as the underdog in Nevada. Bernie outspent 2:1 on TV advertisements in Nevada than Clinton–and lost. Not to mention Karl Rove’s Super PAC has been active in Nevada linking Clinton to Trump’s anti-immigration stance. Why is Karl Rove running negative ads against Clinton designed to help Bernie? The answer is obvious–the GOP wants to run against Bernie, and that should give the “Bernie is more electable” argument people some pause. (I actively do not want Bernie as President, so I’m not voting based on electability, in fact the more electable I think Bernie is, the worse it is for me–because I do not want him in the White House.)
Hillary is currently underperforming the absolute cakewalk some folks predicted back when Bernie was just a mad professor contemplating a run. But those predictions were utterly ahistorical. Nobody other than an incumbent first term President has ever had an unopposed run at their party’s nomination. Some effective opposition always appears.
Yes, the story of HRC invincibility has some noticeable cracks. But again that was an ahistorical and implausible story that only rubes & romantics fell in love with.
As iiandyiiii says, she’s on track to win solidly. The delegate breakdown doesn’t have to be 90/10 for her to be nominated. Because of super-delegates & such she probably only needs 45% of pledged delegates to win. Absent major surprises she’s going to get more like 70% of pledged delegates.
Bernie is so far demonstrating he is a worthy competitor, not a joke *a la *Carson (or even Jeb!) of the other team.
But don’t confuse being a worthy competitor with winning the game.
Caveat: We are still in the first third of this hockey game. Late in the first third, but still a long way to the final horn. Things can change; steamrollers sometimes run out of gas and upsets happen. Nobody has really given or taken any truly hard hits yet. Somebody may have a better punch or a more glassy jaw than expected.
The problem is that Sanders is gaining votes and Hillary is losing them and we can’t be sure yet when this trend will stop. We’ll have to see if the margins stay consistent on March 1.
You don’t “gain or lose votes” before election day, you gain or lose likely voters, it’s different. In a lot of major states where Hillary has big leads, those leads have continued even in recent polling. States like Georgia and Michigan, with large black populations. Michigan also has a large blue collar white population, which is a Demographic that Bernie has been courting since day one. In truth, while I’m sure Bernie loves the young white followers he has, his message and a lot of his “sentimentality” is blue collar Americans, and if he’s down as much as he’s down in Michigan (over 20 pts), that suggests his message isn’t resonating with them.
I also don’t think he’s courting them out of sentimentality, he probably knows he isn’t going to move the needle much on the black vote, so he needs blue collar whites (who also map somewhat in the Democratic primary electorate to whites over age 40) to have a chance.
Exit polling isn’t out yet, but entrance polling is damning for Bernie among blacks: he lost them 76% to 22% to Clinton. There’s been a popular idea that maybe Bernie would turn around his standing with the black electorate after increased name recognition after his win in New Hampshire. Well, in Nevada at least, that hasn’t happened. Polling suggests it hasn’t happened in South Carolina earlier.
I haven’t ran the math through all 50 states but is it even mathematically possible given any realistic numbers for other demographics, for anyone to win the Democratic nomination while losing the black vote by over 50 points? That’s an enormous deficit for a minority which makes up a huge part of the Democratic electorate.
No one was banking on those polls, and the email thing shouldn’t be discounted. It, for better or worse, will and did affect outcome. It’s damaging her.
But at the end of the day, Bernie closed a huge gap in a state that should’ve been an easy win for her.
Perhaps – but it’s a lot easier to go from 10% to 30% then from 30% to 40%, and from 40-45% is even tougher, and every percentage point after that is a real grind. So far Nate Silver’s analysis has been nearly dead on, and considering his track record, I’m still sticking with him. This wasn’t a terrible night for Bernie, but he needed a very good night to be on track for a decent chance at winning the delegate race, and he didn’t get that very good night. Right now he’s behind where he needs to be to win.
We’re talking about Nevada’s democratic primary voter demographic not Nevada’s demographics as a whole. If it’s not moderately diverse then I’m just understating it and should’ve called it “diverse.” 35% non-white is about the same as the country at large.
What would you consider a diverse state? Even the state as a whole is in the lower half for “white percentage” nationwide. The majority of the states that are lower are in the deep south which has high black %, Hawaii which is majority native Hawaiian, Alaska which has a large native population, California/New York/New Jersey which have large diverse populations (both natively and through immigration, as these are popular immigrant destination states), I mean Nevada is less white than Florida which is usually considered to be a pretty diverse state.
Why should it have been an easy win? Caucus polling is garbage and back when the earlier polls were ran no one knew who Bernie was outside of the internet political junkies crowd. He was a national candidate going into this caucus, and lost. His standing isn’t going to be any better in future elections.
The idea that a huge gap was closed is basically false, in terms of awareness Bernie wasn’t even in the race back when those old polls were ran. There’s no reason to assume Nevada would be an easy win for Hillary–like everyone is saying no one other than incumbent Presidents goes unchallenged in their primary, and Nevada was close in 2008.
Shocks me? What are you talking about? It is 6th out of 51 (including DC) for minority population. Relatively speaking it’s not “moderately” diverse. Maybe you’re thinking Nevada is only moderately Black?
The only way one can say that Nevada should have been an easy win for her is to say the complete primary should be an easy win for her.
Yes back in August, before the game began, nationwide polling gave Clinton a 2 to 1 lead over Sanders, 25 points, and now it is only 5 (RCP averages) and that is after a NH bounce. Now the game is afoot. Nevada was prime territory for turnout of excited voters to deliver in a state that is not lily White. It did not.
He now needs to go into March 1 with only lily White next door neighbor NH as a win and on the heels of what is sure to be a complete humiliating loss in SC next Saturday.
