WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Bernie Sanders’ high-flying Democratic presidential campaign fell back to Earth on Saturday in Nevada.
If the Vermont senator cannot quickly find a way to broaden his appeal to minorities and union members, last week’s 22-point rout of Clinton in New Hampshire could prove to be his campaign highlight.
The race moves next week to South Carolina, where blacks make up more than half of the Democratic electorate, and on March 1 to a string of southern states with big blocs of African-Americans, who strongly support Clinton and have been slow to warm to Sanders.
The rush of March contests in big, diverse states — Democrats in nearly two dozen states will vote between March 1 and March 15 — could leave Sanders grasping for political life.
“This was a bad day for Sanders,” said David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina. “He needs to find a way to cut into Clinton’s base, and I don’t think he is going to find it here.”
Although Clinton’s 5-point win was relatively narrow, it was enough to blunt Sanders’ momentum. Recent voter surveys had shown a tight race in Nevada, raising the prospect of another damaging setback for Clinton.
Entrance polls in Nevada showed Clinton trounced Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, by 3-to-1 among black voters, and also beat him in union households by 11 percentage points.
The enthusiasm of younger and liberal voters who rallied around Sanders’ calls for reining in Wall Street and reducing income equality was not enough in Nevada to counter Clinton’s union and organizational clout, allowing her to reclaim front-runner status as the race shifts to more friendly turf.
After the New Hampshire setback, Clinton’s campaign was banking that Sanders would be unable to breach a so-called “firewall” of Hispanic and African-American support for the former Secretary of State in southern and western states.
Nevada’s result appeared to support that view.
“He’s running a strong campaign, but being close is overrated if you can’t make the sale,” said Mo Elleithee, a Clinton aide in her 2008 campaign and now the executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service.
VICTIM OF SUCCESS
The Sanders campaign said it was heartened in Nevada by entrance polls showing he beat Clinton among Hispanics by about eight points.
“What we learned today is Hillary Clinton’s firewall with Latino voters is a myth,” Arturo Carmona, deputy political director for Bernie 2016, said in a statement.
But the Clinton campaign questioned those numbers, saying that at one point she had won 60 percent of the delegates in 22 Latino-majority precincts.