As of 6:15pm, there are no official results out of the Nevada caucuses, but a consortium of news organizations has spotters at over a hundred caucus locations, and they’re reporting that Sanders is going to win, and win very big. If the current numbers are close to accurate, Sanders will possibly get north of 40 percent of the vote, and maybe even above fifty. Joe Biden looks like he’ll come in second place and be viable at over 15 percent. Pete Buttigieg is right on the cusp of fifteen percent. Everyone else looks like they’ll be out of luck.
From the look of things, Sanders is benefitting from getting more second choice votes than Biden, so his lead expands once votes for non-viable candidates are reallocated. There is some exit poll data floating around, too, which indicated that Sanders is doing well with minority voters, and also that Biden is doing much worse in the whiter, northern part of the state than in the more diverse southern part.
If these numbers hold, it will be a tremendous victory for Sanders both because of the size of the win and his delegate haul, and because it will demonstrate that he has substantial support with blacks and Latinos.
Assuming that Biden holds onto second place and gets a chunk of delegates, it will be a decent result for him that could be enough to carry him to victory in South Carolina. He certainly cannot afford anything less than this. But it will be an extremely weak second place. His best hope is that it mortally wounds Klobuchar and to some degree Buttigieg and that he can collect some of their support. Elizabeth Warren really needs to hope that the initial numbers are understating her performance, because if she gets shut out of the delegates in fourth place, it’s going to kill the momentum she got out of a very strong debate. It appears that many of her voters were reallocated to Sanders, and if she cannot continue it will be a boon for him.
Based on these factors, it looks like Bloomberg will probably do more to assure Sanders wins the nomination than he will to hurt him. Without Bloomberg, Biden might be able to consolidate some anti-Sanders support, but he isn’t doing well enough to make a strong argument that he’s better positioned to be the alternative to Sanders than Bloomberg. On the other hand, Bloomberg would have preferred Biden to die a violent death at the polls in Nevada, and that doesn’t look like it happened, either.
It’s not over yet, but Sanders looks like he’s close to winning this thing. He has to be the overwhelming favorite now.
Absolutely beautiful result.
If you wanted single payer health care, you got it and WaPo has a nice article about it and, notably, how he will pay for it. Of course Chris Mathews thinks it’s communist. But he is an asshole. Still there will be a heck of a fight about it.
Irrelevant if the Democrats don’t take the Senate. And even if they do, it’s not a given that both the House and the Senate would go for such a big change in health care rather than more incremental changes
I mostly agree. I like that Bernie’s plan finally has a way to pay for it that is not outrageous. Until that I thought both Bernie and Warren were dying on that hill. I implored Warren to adopt a plan that kept payments for health care supported by corporations, as they do now. Bernie’s plan now has that feature. So at least it is a way forward. One small step at a time perhaps.
There is not the slightest chance that if elected Bernie could pass any significant portion of his agenda. M4A: not happening. Decriminalizing the border: not happening. Free college: not happening. The Green New Deal: not happening. Bernie is selling a fantasy.
It’s a free country (for the moment) but if you’re supporting Bernie because you like his platform, you’re voting for a fantasy which, even if we somehow took the Senate by one vote, is not going to happen. Nothing will happen that Joe Manchin doesn’t want to happen, and we’ll be hard-put to keep him from switching parties.
There is only one Democratic agenda item we have any hope of achieving, and that is beating Trump. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
wow. Earlier this week I saw reporting that Sanders was doing very well with Latinx voters and that seems borne out here, and is very promising for California.
I still haven’t made up my mind. In a lot of ways I like Warren better, but I see a Sanders wave coming in.
Warren lost it when she gave up on health care. Too bad.
Incorrect. She lost when the media, the centrists, and the left decided she needed to be stopped and simultaneously took her down. Then she got a bad poll in Sienna/NYT. Then AOC endorses Sanders.
She had the potential to be the bridge, but the centrists decided they wanted Pete and Amy. I’m fine with Bernie, but Warren would be a better president.
No she gave up the biggest issue in the campaign for progressives. Then she lost. ( in late November and early December )
Polling shows her falling before your timeline.
I think you’re both kind of wrong. She cratered when she began discussing M4A and finally had to backtrack to stop her collapse, and I don’t think the media is all that responsible for the result.
She was never going to win the M4A vote away from Bernie, but she was progressive enough to hold part of that wing and technocratic and populist enough to hold other wings. She needed to be a little be of something to all people–a progressive leaning bridge and uniter. And somehow she decided to fight on Bernie’s battlefield when he held the high ground. It was clueless and I said it was suicidal at the time.
She had no way to pay for it and stuttered when asked. Bernie didn’t either for awhile. I don’t see any problem if they both had a workable plan. She gave up. Sanders now owns this space and will ride it home. Or as far as he can. Warren was a nice alternative to Sanders.
An observation from the spouse: Biden and Buttigieg have shifted to attacking Bernie, but Warren is focusing on attacking Bloomberg. Not on personal but on ideological grounds. She sees him as the real threat to our democracy. We’d survive a Bernie presidency, but if Bloomberg buys his way into the presidency, we’re sunk. Warren sees that, so she is taking on that threat and exposing him. (This is my simplified version.)
I’d like a chance to vote for my favorite viable candidate (no thanks to the primary system), but no matter what else happens, thank you Elizabeth, for taking on Bloomberg.
Good observation. Yesterday I began to get really depressed after reading that Clint Eastwood might (did?) endorse Bloomberg — why wouldn’t he? Bloomberg on many (most?) issues is a republican. Somebody needs to take him on.
Just think of how many republicans would be in a Bloomberg cabinet.
Speaking of which, can we have a rule that in any democratic administration (if we are lucky enough to ever have one again), no one can serve in any position of authority if they were not on-the-record anti-Trump prior to 2018. (This rule, of course, would preclude 99% of republicans from serving in a democratic administration.)