SIOUX CITY, Iowa — All but assured of a respectable showing – if not outright victories – in the first two early-voting states, Bernie Sanders’ top campaign aides are gaming out a protracted delegate fight with Hillary Clinton that borrows from the Obama playbook.

The Sanders campaign is finalizing plans for its alternative route to the Democratic nomination, a classic insurgent strategy that is heavily reliant on the limited number of states holding caucuses.


The idea is to take advantage of the caucus format, which tends to reward campaigns with the most dedicated partisans. The caucuses play to Sanders’ strength in another important way – they are largely held in states that are heavily white, which helps Sanders neutralize Clinton’s edge with minority voters.

With a dozen such contests coming before the end of March – and Clinton expected to perform well on March 1, the first big multi-state primary day -- the caucuses are emerging as an integral part of Sanders’ long-shot plan.

“Caucuses are very good for Bernie Sanders,” explained chief Sanders strategist Tad Devine, likening the 2016 strategy to the one he deployed as Mike Dukakis’ field director in 1988. “Caucuses tend to be in the much-lower turnout universe, and having people who intensely support you in events like that makes a huge difference. You saw that with President Obama in 2008, and you’re going to see it with Bernie Sanders."

For the Clinton camp, it’s a sensitive issue. They dispute the idea that Sanders will be able to pull it off, offering repeated assurances that the campaign learned from its mistakes in 2008, when Clinton fell to a more organized Obama in caucuses all over the country as he slowly amassed enough delegates to win.

“In the 2008 campaign, Secretary Clinton’s campaign was late to get staff out to those states and really got blown out by the Obama campaign,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told MNSBC on Friday. “We’re just not [going to] let that happen this time."

The first staffers the Clinton team hired outside of the four early states, for example, were in Minnesota and Colorado — the two states that hold caucuses on March 1. The Brooklyn-based operation has also unveiled ‘leadership councils’ of top elected officials in each state with a caucus before March 15.

Both candidates have also been sure to visit those strategically important states: Sanders will jump north from Iowa Tuesday, just days before the first-in-the-nation caucus, for a pair of events in Duluth and St. Paul.

In Colorado, the Clinton camp has been fleshing out its state organization, holding training for the caucuses with over 200 precinct captains that began as early as January 9.

In Minnesota, the first full-time Clinton staffers arrived in August, according to state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin. The Sanders forces came the following month.

Both campaigns now have detailed plans to redeploy Iowa and New Hampshire staffers to the March states once the first two states are done voting — with Minnesota prominent among the destinations because of the difficulty of tightly organizing for a caucus and because it offers one of the biggest delegate hauls of any caucus state.

“We have supported progressive insurgent candidates in the past in our caucuses,” explained Martin. “In 1988, Jesse Jackson won the caucuses here in Minnesota. And in 2004, Dennis Kucinich’s largest delegation to the convention came from the state of Minnesota."

Yet Sanders’ strategy is something of a bank shot. Democratic caucuses, as opposed to primaries, account for just a small portion of the pledged delegates in the party’s selection process — around 15 percent — not nearly enough to offset Clinton’s expected big-state victories. The caucus wins are intended to sustain Sanders’ bid, rather than expected to propel him to the nomination on their own accord.

For the plan to work, he’ll also need to be competitive in primary election states and score a few surprise finishes. As it stands, Sanders faces a serious uphill climb once he gets past Iowa and New Hampshire — states where he polls well with the liberal, white populations that resemble his home state of Vermont. A recent Cook Political Report analysis of the Democratic delegates, for example, found that 98 percent of all the pledged delegates are set to originate in states that have lower proportions of liberal white voters than the first two voting states, where Sanders and Clinton are neck-and-neck.

To defeat Clinton for the nomination, Sanders would likely need to outperform his current numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the Cook analysis, while making considerable inroads with minority voters who will be casting ballots on March 1 and March 15, two dates filled with big-state primaries.

As Sanders’ team has mapped it out, his path starts with strong showings in Iowa — a caucus state where recent polling shows Clinton and Sanders running neck-and-neck — and New Hampshire — a primary state where he’s led in every major public poll over the past month.

Eyeing Super Tuesday on March 1, Sanders aides concede Clinton is poised for wins in what they consider her six-state Southern stronghold: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. But they see opportunities for gains in Minnesota and Colorado, Sanders’ home state of Vermont, and two other primary states where the senator is well-known: Massachusetts and Virginia -- despite the deep ties between Virginia’s Democratic establishment and the Clinton camp.

The hope is for something resembling a split-decision, allowing the Sanders campaign to gain some momentum in the three caucuses that come into focus the following weekend: Kansas and Nebraska (March 5) and Maine (March 6).

But it doesn’t get any easier for Sanders from there. A best-case scenario has Sanders pulling out a labor-fueled surprise in Michigan on March 8 — he’ll be up against Clinton’s advantage with minorities and the state’s Democratic establishment, her campaign's active presence there during the Flint water crisis, and its broad array of national union endorsements. If Sanders manages to remain competitive there, it might sustain him through the gauntlet of large swing states and a barrage of delegates on March 15 (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio).

Next up?

A stretch of six smaller states, five of which — Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington — hold caucuses.