COLUMBIA, S.C. — It wasn’t the victory they once envisioned, but it was the win Hillary Clinton’s campaign desperately needed. The Nevada results were enough to signal Saturday that this isn’t 2008, that Bernie Sanders isn’t Barack Obama and, most important, that the underlying premise of the Clinton campaign remains intact.

The Clinton theory of the case – that the math simply doesn’t work for Sanders beyond the largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire – appeared to be validated by Nevada: In the first demographically diverse state of the Democratic primary season, Clinton prevailed and Sanders fell short.


Now, on the heels of a Clinton victory powered by her landslide winning margin among African-Americans, the spotlight turns to South Carolina -- where black voters are expected to cast a majority of the vote in the Feb. 27 Democratic primary.

“Until [Sanders] can break into African-Americans somehow, some way, it doesn’t add up. Whatever the spin is, it’s clear [that’s] what the campaigns are fighting over,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004.

The state is shaping up to be unforgiving terrain for Sanders, and he seemed to reflect that in a concession speech that looked to the March 1 Super Tuesday contests, rather than the upcoming South Carolina contest.

“I believe that on Super Tuesday we have got an excellent chance to win many of those states,” Sanders said before leaving the state. “Now it’s on to Super Tuesday.”

In the hours after Nevada was called for Clinton, the candidate and her allies sought to highlight the difficulty of the map ahead for Sanders, beginning in South Carolina but also on Super Tuesday, when much of the South will vote – including a number of states with sizable African-American populations.

“She heads into a number of southern states where the population is older, it’s more African American, all the dynamics are in her favor, so she should have a strong run,” said Jim Hodges, South Carolina’s last Democratic governor. “We talk about momentum quite a bit, and it’s going to be hard on him if he goes three weeks without any big wins."

The calendar is also bearing down on Sanders. He has less than two weeks to introduce himself widely enough in the larger Super Tuesday states – a problem that can’t simply be addressed by blanketing those states with advertising.

“Bernie campaigns best when he can do a lot of rallies and a lot of town halls in a particular state,” said former Pennsylvania Governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell, a Clinton ally. “[Now] there’s just no time."

For the first time this election cycle, Sanders' usually talkative senior staff went radio silent after the results landed -- and no top staffers spoke with reporters at Sanders' brief caucus night party as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If there was a silver lining for Sanders in his defeat, it came from the frenzied finish in Nevada – he roared back from a big deficit in the polls and nearly caught Clinton, whose campaign began organizing the state months before the Vermont senator. He also posted blowout numbers yet again among young voters, something even Clinton acknowledged by directly addressing young people in her victory speech.

In an especially promising development for the Sanders campaign, entrance polls reported he won a 53 percent to 45 percent majority among Hispanic voters. Yet that achievement – which undermines the idea that Sanders’ support is limited to white voters – came with an asterisk. Given the composition and size of Clinton’s victory, questions were raised about the accuracy of that figure by the Clinton campaign and others.

“In the 22 Latino-majority precincts in NV that have reported results so far, Hillary Clinton has won 60 percent of the delegates,” tweeted her national press secretary Brian Fallon on Saturday evening.

While Clinton partisans seemed to view the results as the beginning of the end for Sanders, the senator himself showed no sign of disappointment -- and even seemed reluctant to concede.

“The final results are in from Nevada and it looks like we’re going to leave another state with roughly the same number of delegates as Hillary Clinton, maybe down just a few,” he wrote in an email sent to supporters. “I want to be completely clear with you about what this result means: Nevada was supposed to be a state "tailor made" for the Clinton campaign, and a place she once led by almost 40 points. But today, we sent a message that will stun the political and financial establishment of this country: our campaign can win anywhere.”

His own relentless optimism continued at his relatively empty caucus night party, held in a cavernous amphitheater outside of Las Vegas, where he predicted that the scene at July’s Democratic National Convention would be evidence of his ‘political revolution.'

But top Democrats, in the wake of Nevada and with South Carolina looming, weren’t convinced there was a viable path to get that far.

“There are two things that are important in politics: time and money,” said Trippi. “[Sanders is] going to have the money. It’s just a question of time."

