Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Hillary Clinton may have had a “firewall” of African-American and Latino voters to save her in Nevada. But it didn’t materialize on its own. Clinton had to rebuild it in the final days, and she did it by embracing a message on race first articulated by one of her most prominent critics.

After Bernie Sanders’ New Hampshire blowout, voters of color—young voters especially— were increasingly intrigued by his economic populist pitch. To keep them in her fold, she faced a stiff challenge: prove she could be as trusted to rein in Wall Street as Sanders, while making the case she had more to offer than Sanders. But relying on a message of pragmatism and experience had fallen flat.


So she turned to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates is a Sanders supporter and no fan of either of the Clintons. He ripped Bill Clinton’s criminal justice record in his epic essay “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Last month, Coates slammed her thumbnail version of post-Civil War reconstruction as evidence she is “a candidate who seems comfortable doling out the kind of myths that undergirded racist violence.”

But The Atlantic writer has also excoriated the Vermont senator for rejecting reparations for African-Americans on pragmatist grounds. Coates questioned why Sanders’ ”radicalism” applied to solving economic inequality but not racial inequality: “This is the ‘class first’ approach … But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates.”

Two days before Coates’ knock on Sanders, the Democratic candidates participated in a debate co-hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. Despite the focus on race, Clinton said nothing to suggest that Sanders’ economic focus distracted from matters of civil rights.

Then came New Hampshire. Clinton used her concession speech as an opportunity to retool, adopting Coates’ critique and making it her own.

After co-opting the heart of the Sanders’ stump (“No bank … too big to fail and no executive too powerful to jail,” “stop other countries from taking advantage of us with unfair trade practices.”), she deemed his economic populist agenda to be “not enough” since “we also have to break through the barriers of bigotry.”

She sounded even more like Coates four days before the Nevada caucus in a speech to civil rights leaders in Harlem: “We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism. Because these are not only problems of economic inequality. These are problems of racial inequality.”

That speech was titled “Breaking Down Barriers,” and the disciplined Clinton mentioned “barriers” six times in Thursday’s televised town hall, as a way to emphasize there is more than one kind of barrier holding people back: “I've laid out plans to remove the economic barriers that stand in the way of young people … I want to be sure that we knock down the barriers that hold back people because of racism, sexism, homophobia, all the other kinds of prejudice and bias that is out there.”

Clinton may not be proposing reparations anytime soon, and may lack any trace of “radicalism” that has been so appealing to left-leaning youth. But she is putting her anti-racism message on an equal footing with her economic message. And she is using the Coates’ argument to show Sanders isn’t.

And in her victory speech last night—with an eye toward upcoming primaries in Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma and later in West Virginia—she expanded the critique to encompass Native American and white working-class concerns: “We also agree that Wall Street can never be allowed to threaten Main Street again … But, if we listen to the voices of Flint, and Ferguson, if we open our hearts to the families of coal country, and Indian country … it's clear there is so much more to be done.”

Sanders has been working furiously to make inroads with nonwhite voters. And in Nevada, he did, picking up 42 percent. There is controversy over how well he did with Latinos—the entrance poll has him winning them outright with 53 percent, but Clinton’s strong performance in Latino areas suggests that overstates the case. Still, he surely did better with Latinos than African-Americans, though even there he wasn’t shut out, tallying 22 percent. And what he received mainly came from younger voters; National Journal’s Ron Brownstein noted on Twitter, “Huge gap in @SenSanders support among non-whites over & under 45: bigger than divergence among whites.”

To earn as much as he did, Sanders had to make his own adjustments. When he suffered repeated ambushes by Black Lives Matter protesters last summer, he beefed up the criminal justice reform section of his stump speech and touted his civil rights activism in the 1960s. He secured high-profile endorsers on the black left, including professor Cornel West and rap star Killer Mike.

But the essence of Sanders’ candidacy is a relentless focus on corporate power and the wealth gap. He has spent his political career proving that his populist broadsides can bring together social liberals and rural gun-toting white conservatives, in Vermont at least. He hasn’t spent a lifetime working in communities of color, let alone refining his rhetoric for them.

Sanders also is unable to easily attack Clinton where she is weakest on the criminal justice issue, the 1994 crime bill loathed by Coates and others. The complicated law had been a prize achievement among some on the left, who touted its assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act. But in recent years it has become reviled for contributing to the mass incarceration of African-Americans.

Both Clintons have expressed regret for the crime bill’s impact on the African-American community, but that is not enough for some. The law was the main focus of the recent polemic in The Nation, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve The Black Vote.” But Sanders can’t use Bill Clinton’s signature as a political weapon: He voted for the bill as a member of House.

So despite his gains among young voters of color, it’s not enough to win in the upcoming racially diverse primary states if he’s splitting the white vote with Clinton, as he did in both Iowa and Nevada. (New Hampshire’s romp increasingly looks like a geographical anomaly for Sanders.)

It’s also not evident Sanders is interested in adjusting his approach any more than he already has. Unlike Clinton’s New Hampshire concession, Sanders’ Nevada remarks offered no hint of a message recalibration. He appeared to downplay the February 27 South Carolina primary, closing with “It’s on to Super Tuesday,” where there will be more democratic socialist-friendly terrain in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado and his home state of Vermont.

Clinton, meanwhile, wasted no time to further elevate civil rights, going to a historically black college in Houston last night after her Nevada win and tearing into the state’s voter ID law. Texas just so happens to be the biggest delegate prize on March 1.

With his continued deep support among younger voters, winning 72 percent of Nevada voters under 45, Sanders may be content with where he’s at: keeping the delegate tally close and making a stand for his platform on the convention floor.

That’s the difference between a “message” candidate and a traditional candidate. The traditional candidate reads the room and makes adjustments on the fly, worrying more about riding the wave of popular sentiment than tut-tutting over “authenticity.” Whereas the message candidate wants to deliver only that message.

Clinton had the flexibility to simultaneously co-opt Sanders’ economic message and outmaneuver him on race. Even last night, she wasn’t done tinkering with her stump, hoping to win over “all the young people out there” of all races by stressing student debt relief and teasing “new ways for more Americans to get involved in national service.”

Sanders’ rigid message may not be enough to unite all Democratic constituencies, let alone win the presidency, on its own. But he’s still proving it can take a candidate pretty far.