Four years ago, almost to the day, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders took the stage at the Henderson Pavilion to announce that he had lost the Nevada caucus.

But he was, surprisingly, upbeat. That’s because Sanders, with his quixotic, longshot campaign calling for a political revolution, had only lost to Clinton, running with the full force of the Democratic Party establishment behind her, by a little more than 5 percentage points. In the months leading to the caucus, he had been projected to lose by some 20, 30 or 40 points to the former secretary of state.

“We have come a very long way in nine months. It is clear to me, and I think most observers, that the wind is at our backs,” Sanders said. “We have the momentum.”

And he was right. It just took a little bit longer than Sanders had anticipated.

Now, somehow, the likeliest thing heading into Nevada’s first-in-the-West nominating contest on Saturday is that Sanders will win, likelier even than the chance the Democratic Party voting goes off without a hitch in the wake of Iowa’s problem plagued-contest earlier this month.

Sanders has, as he projected four years ago, had the wind at his back. He received the most raw votes out of the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, which appear to be buoying him here. The latest polls show Sanders with a substantial lead in the Silver State, between seven and 15 points ahead of his next closest competitor.

Where Sanders’ campaign was scrappy and grassroots in 2016, this time around the Vermont senator hired a team of experienced political operatives who know the state well and have been able to harness the grassroots energy that was behind him four years ago. He also has, by far, the largest staff in the state with 250 people on the ground ahead of the caucus, which has allowed the campaign to knock half a million doors in advance of Caucus Day.

But as his frontrunner status has solidified, he has become even more of a target, particularly for moderate Democrats who view him as too far left to be electable. It was a point that he confronted head on during a get out the caucus rally with more than 2,000 of his supporters at Springs Preserve Friday night.

“I think the American people understand that, yeah, we disagree on issues, that’s called democracy. We disagree on issues,” Sanders said. “We cannot disagree that the president of the United States is simply not the kind of man that we need to have in the White House.”

Nevada had, at one point this cycle, appeared to be the place where Sanders’ presidential aspirations might have ended, after he suffered a heart attack here in October. Now, the state seems poised to formally cement Sanders as the frontrunner in the race and create substantial momentum heading into South Carolina’s primary next week and the Super Tuesday contests just days later.

Sanders also doesn’t appear, based on the few available polls, to have been significantly wounded by a dustup with the politically powerful Culinary Union, which represents about 60,000 hotel workers across the state. The union has been circulating a flyer saying that Sanders, if elected president, would “end” their much-loved health insurance plans.

In fact, Sanders appears so assured of a victory in Nevada that he spent Friday morning campaigning in California and isn’t sticking around for a victory party on Saturday. Instead, he’ll be campaigning in El Paso, Texas.

As far as who is likely to take second — or third or fourth or fifth place — on Saturday, the picture is far less clear. Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California billionaire Tom Steyer and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar all have polling averages hovering in the 10 to 17 percent range, with Biden, perhaps, slightly ahead.

Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event inside the Hyde Park Middle School gym in Las Vegas on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. (Daniel Clark/The Nevada Independent)

And Biden is the one who, arguably, needs a victory in Nevada the most. After coming in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, the former vice president blamed his losses on the lack of diversity in the first two nominating states. If he loses in Nevada, and is unable to retain the support he has within communities of color in the state, it will be hard for him to continue to make the argument that he’s the candidate best equipped to energize the Democratic Party to defeat President Donald Trump come November.

Biden, rallying supporters at Hyde Park Middle School in Las Vegas, framed the Saturday nominating contest as a fresh start for his campaign.

“It’s the beginning of a representation of what the country looks like,” he said. “I really mean it. It’s the first in the West, and it makes a great deal of difference.”

Then there’s Buttigieg, the candidate whose trajectory changed the most out of Iowa and New Hampshire. Over the last eight months, the former South Bend mayor has built a substantial operation here on the ground, with about 100 staffers ahead of the caucus, and slowly caught on, attracting hundreds and then more than a thousand people to his rallies. But that support hasn’t, until recently, translated into the polls.

Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks at a rally at Faiss Middle School on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. (Jana Sayson/The Nevada Independent)

His campaign is now banking on the momentum he has coming out of the first two nominating contests, where he nipped at Sanders heels on the popular vote and actually emerged one national delegate ahead, coupled with the organization they have built to carry them to another success here.

“There are a lot of Americans who look at the campaign and see they’re supposed to choose between a revolution or keeping the status quo, and don’t see where they fit in that picture,” Buttigieg told a crowd of about 1,200 who showed up at Faiss Middle School for a final rally. “We’ve got to build a picture of belonging that lets everybody who wants to see change stand side-by-side, even if they don’t agree 100 percent of the time.”

But Nevada is not Iowa and it is not New Hampshire. Roughly 30 percent of the state’s population is Latino, 10 percent is Asian American and Pacific Islander, and another 10 percent black. And it’s unclear to what extent Buttigieg has been able to make inroads with voters of color here.

He spent a brief bit of time canvassing on Friday with prominent DREAMer Astrid Silva, who had put out a call on Twitter for presidential canvass with her in her neighborhood “at unvetted doors.”

Gina Barrios, one of the people Buttigieg talked to while canvassing, said she knew of the former South Bend mayor from his TV commercials and appreciated his efforts to get to know the Latino community. In addition to a significant English-language buy, the campaign has been running Spanish-language ads, narrated by Buttigieg himself, since December.

“We’re trying to ensure that everything is for the good of this country,” Barrios said. “May the best person win and may God help them.”

Supporters cheer while Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at CSN's Henderson campus on Monday, Feb. 17, 2020. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

Warren also has a shot at scooping up some additional delegates out of Nevada’s caucus, though it’s unclear to what extent her strong debate performance this week will provide a boost for her heading into Saturday after middling performances in Iowa and New Hampshire. After trying to position herself as the unity candidate in the race, Warren has changed her tack and gone on the offensive in the days leading up to Nevada’s caucus.

“When other people who are running for president — and I say this just as a factual statement — like Bernie, who say they want to make real change but they will not roll back the filibuster, keep in mind what that means,” she told about 500 supporters at the Clark County Government amphitheater. “They have given a veto to the gun industry to prevent real change and gun reform.”

Warren’s team landed earliest on the ground Nevada, though the team of about 50 staffers has since been surpassed in size several times over by some of the other campaigns.

Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer as seen during a tour of the Culinary Health Center in Las Vegas on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. (Daniel Clark/The Nevada Independent)

California billionaire Tom Steyer, too, is banking on Nevada to elevate his position in the race by appealing to a diverse group of Democratic voters after barely registering any sport in the first two contests. Intrigued by his millions of dollars in ads, many Nevadans have taken a closer look at Steyer over the last couple of months and quickly became a top choice for many with his more moderate positions on some things, such as health care, and more aggressive ones on others, including term limits and climate change.

“This is the first place that you can claim that you pulled together the diverse coalition that is the Democratic Party,” Steyer told his supporters who had gathered at an event space nestled between the Las Vegas Strip and downtown Las Vegas. “So if we come through tomorrow, that is going to be a statement to the entire nation, and the world about what it means to pull the Democratic Party together, and to go from there, and win.”

Klobuchar, after a surprising third-place victory in New Hampshire, has sought to maintain her momentum coming into Nevada. But she has had a hurdle to overcome that the other candidates don’t — the fact that her staff just landed on the ground in the Silver State in November and only recently ballooned to 50. She spent her final day in the state campaigning in Reno and the not-often-visited Elko, positioning herself as someone who can appeal to urban and rural America alike.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar campaigns at the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows, William N. Pennington facility on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020, in Reno. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)

"I am someone that always believed that you don't just go to one part of a state — or even the big cities — that you go everywhere," Klobuchar told supporters at the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows.

But the overarching question in all of this is whether the caucus will actually work. The Nevada State Democratic Party undertook a major overhaul of the caucus process in the wake of Iowa’s failed contest, scrapping two apps it had planned to use and replacing them with a simpler, though more labor-intensive Google Forms-based calculator. The mechanism is responsible for folding in 75,000 early voters’ presidential preferences at their home precinct, just as if they had been there to participate in person on Caucus Day.

But one Democratic campaign aide said that as of 11 p.m. Friday the campaign had not yet received a batch of promised data with the names of the roughly 39,000 people who cast their votes on the fourth and final day, Tuesday, of the early voting period. Campaigns, in general, have been using the data received from the party from the first three days of early voting to narrow their voter contact efforts to just those people who haven’t yet voted.

The fact that campaigns had not yet received the data as of late Friday night suggests that the party has not yet finished processing the tens of thousands of early votes, which all must be completed before the caucus begins at noon on Saturday.

Then there are the broader concerns about whether the party’s roughly 3,000 volunteers have been adequately trained on the new protocol. One volunteer, Chris Erbe, attended an in-person training on Friday expecting to be able to have a hands-on demonstration with the party-purchased iPads precinct chairs are supposed to use to access the Google Forms-based caucus calculator, but said that didn’t happen.

“I did not even need to come to this training,” Erbe said.

But Erbe said that he thought the caucus would go okay if precinct chairs are able to use the calculator as promised — “if” being the operative word.

Jackie Valley, Jacob Solis, Michelle Rindels, Luz Gray, Shannon Miller, Kristyn Leonard and Daniel Rothberg contributed to this report.