Highlights and analysis of the Republican South Carolina primary and Democratic Nevada caucuses.

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After two contests in mostly white and rural Iowa and New Hampshire, the presidential primaries finally turn today to contests that are more representative of the national electorate.

For the Democrats, Nevada is the first contest with a meaningful nonwhite and urban population. South Carolina offers an ideologically balanced contest for Republicans, with a far more typical number of self-described “moderate” and “very conservative voters” than in Iowa or New Hampshire.

To many, the Nevada caucuses can be seen as a referendum on Hillary Clinton; the South Carolina primary could help clarify the Republican field. Here are some ways to look at the results as they roll in.

The Nevada Democratic Caucuses

Let me start by admitting that I don’t have a good read on what’s going to happen in the Democrats’ Nevada caucus Saturday. And I’m not sure how much we should read into the result, either.

There has been nearly no public polling. And Nevada has a caucus system, which means low turnout and which can result in unrepresentative outcomes.

Of course, that won’t stop people from trying to make sense of the result. The conventional wisdom holds that Nevada should be a pretty good state for Hillary Clinton, and it’s not hard to see why. She excels among nonwhite voters, and Nevada is the sixth-most diverse state in the country.

But the state’s demographics aren’t quite as good for Mrs. Clinton as many assume. There’s even a reasonable argument that it should be considered a slightly better than average state for Bernie Sanders.

How could that be, given Mrs. Clinton’s strength among nonwhite voters and Nevada’s diversity?

The Democratic Electorate Isn’t That Diverse

Nevada has a population that’s 52 percent white, according to census data.

But the Democratic electorate in Nevada is no more diverse than the national average. In 2008, the entrance polls found that white voters were 65 percent of the Democratic electorate, compared with 62 percent in a compilation of national exit poll data (the latter figure may overstate the diversity of the national electorate in 2008, because it did not include data for a host of Western, mostly white caucus states).

Similarly, about 57 percent of Nevada voters who supported President Obama in 2012 were white, compared with 59 percent nationally, according to Upshot estimates based on census and polling data.

How could Democratic voters in Nevada be no more diverse than Democratic voters nationally? It’s because Nevada’s nonwhite residents — and voters — are far more likely to be Hispanic or Asian-American than the national nonwhite population. Hispanic and Asian-American voters are less likely to be eligible to vote, either as a result of their age or their citizenship, than black voters. Black residents aren’t just likelier to be eligible to vote; black adult citizens are also vastly more likely to vote than Hispanic or Asian-American adult citizens.

Asian-Americans and Hispanics also tend to vote less uniformly Democratic than black voters, who vote nearly unanimously for Democrats.

The combination of these three factors means that many more black residents end up as Democratic primary voters than other nonwhite residents. Black voters punch far above their share of the population in Democratic primaries, while other nonwhite voters do not.

There’s one other factor at play: Nevada’s white voters are slightly more Democratic than white voters nationwide. Many of the nation’s most diverse states, especially in the South, have white voters who lean extremely Republican. In those states, fewer Democratic white voters means a more diverse Democratic electorate. In Nevada, more Democratic white voters means a less diverse Democratic electorate.

In the end, the Nevada Democratic electorate winds up as white as the national average.

Does that make the state a perfectly fair demographic test? Not necessarily. Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton can each count on a demographic advantage beyond the simple, fair split between nonwhite and white voters.

It Has Lots of Older White Voters

One thing that helps Mrs. Clinton is that the state’s white voters are relatively old.

The state’s white population, measured by median age, is the seventh oldest in the country. It has the third-lowest percentage of 18-to-29-year-old whites, leading only Florida and New Mexico at 16.1 percent.

This should help Mrs. Clinton do a bit better among white voters, since there’s a huge generational split in that group. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Sanders won greater than 80 percent of white voters who were 18 to 29, so a younger white electorate can make a difference. When you combine the slightly older population with a more diverse electorate, the voting power of young white voters plummets by as much as two-thirds compared with those early states.

But the difference between the age of the white population in Nevada and the rest of the country isn’t huge. Nationwide, those who are 18 to 29 represent 18.6 percent of white adults — just 2.5 points more than Nevada’s 16.1 percent. There’s not much variance in the age of populations across the country, so being the “oldest” state doesn’t necessarily make a state that much older than the others.

It gives her an advantage, but not a big one.

But Not So Many Black Voters

Mrs. Clinton does have a potential disadvantage: the small number of black voters in Nevada.

According to Upshot estimates, black voters represented about 15 percent of Mr. Obama’s voters in Nevada in 2012, compared with 24 percent nationally. Similarly, the exit polls put the black share of the caucus in 2008 at 15 percent, compared with 19 percent in the national exit polls.

Whether that means Nevada’s a tough state for Mrs. Clinton hinges on an important question: Is she strong among all nonwhite voters or just black voters?

We know Mrs. Clinton leads among black voters by a huge margin in polls. She’s up by at least 40 points among black voters in South Carolina, for instance. But it’s less clear whether she holds a similar edge among other groups of nonwhite voters. Most national polls don’t include a large enough sample of Hispanic voters to report it separately, and there have been few polls of states with a large Hispanic population. We know even less about the Asian-American vote, which is also larger in Nevada than the national average.

If her edge among nonwhite voters is mainly among black voters — and there’s some, admittedly inconclusive, evidence to support that view — then there’s a pretty decent argument that Mrs. Clinton should fare slightly worse in Nevada than she would in most states. If her strength among nonwhite voters is broad, then the state should basically reflect the national electorate, with perhaps a slight edge to Mrs. Clinton from the state’s slightly older white electorate.

How to Read the Hispanic Vote

This has some interesting implications for how to interpret the results on Saturday.

The better Mrs. Clinton does among Hispanic voters, the harder it will be to argue that she should have been expected to fare worse in Nevada than nationally. If she nonetheless finds herself in a tight race, presumably by losing big among white voters, there won’t be much of an excuse for her disappointing performance.

If she does worse among Hispanic voters, it will obviously be good news for Mr. Sanders. We will have learned that Hispanics, a key voting bloc, are less favorable to Mrs. Clinton than some people assumed.

But if it winds up being a tight race because of limited support from Hispanic voters, her campaign managers could argue that her core advantage — black voters — is still to come.







