LAS VEGAS — On Saturday in Nevada, Bernie Sanders laid waste not just to his five main rivals but also to every shard of conventional wisdom about the Democratic presidential primaries.

You could see the dominoes of punditry cliches falling inside the caucus rooms. At the Bellagio Hotel, which held one of several “Strip caucuses” meant to be easily accessible to hospitality workers along Vegas’ main drag, 75 Sanders supporters gathered along the wall of a ballroom.


The powerful Culinary Workers Union, which opposes Sanders’ "Medicare for All" plan and spent the final weeks of the campaign in a high-profile fight with his campaign, was supposed to weaken him. And yet the Sanders’ ranks were speckled with red-shirted Culinary members. (Overall, Sanders won 34 percent of caucusgoers from union households, besting all of his rivals.)

Sanders wasn’t supposed to be able to break through with black and brown voters, but the group was racially and ethnically diverse. (Sanders won 27 percent of African Americans and 53 percent of Hispanics across the state.) The Sanders movement is supposed to be limited to those crazy college kids who don’t remember "socialist" as a slur. But there were plenty of older Sanders backers at the Bellagio chanting “Bernie” along with their 20-something comrades. (Sanders won every age category in the state except Nevadans older than 65, which he ceded to Joe Biden.)

Sure, the numbers are tiny. In a state of 3 million people, turnout of over 100,000 participants is considered enormous. Candidate events here on the days leading up to the caucuses were sleepy affairs, with fewer attendees than in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the big cities are a fraction of the size of Vegas.

But the Sanders victory still exploded a lot of myths. He was said to have a ceiling of 30 percent or so. Remarkably, against a much larger field of candidates Sanders is poised to come close to the same level of support as he did in 2016 in a one-on-one race against Hillary Clinton, to whom he lost 47 percent to 53 percent. (He was at 46 percent with a quarter of precincts reporting as of late Saturday.) He was said to be unable to attract anyone outside his core base. But he held his own with moderate voters (22 percent) and won across every issue area except voters who cared most about foreign policy, who went with Biden.


All of this makes the results of the Nevada caucuses, which in the past have not been treated with the same importance as the contests in the three other early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — matter more this year. They have helped settle lingering questions about Sanders' appeal.

More important, Nevada exposed his four main rivals as weak, divided, and grasping at increasingly tenuous arguments about how they can still win.

Warren came in a distant fourth place but still argued that since the Vegas debate on Wednesday, when she reversed a yearlong plan not to pillory her opponents, “our support has been growing everywhere.” Except Nevada, apparently. In fact, voters who decided in the days following the debate were roughly divided between supporting Sanders (24 percent), Pete Buttigieg (21 percent), Warren (21 percent), and Biden (19 percent).

After her unexpected surge into third place in New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar had a narrow window to consolidate support and emerge as a serious threat to Sanders. Her poor showing in Nevada — fifth place with just over 4 percent as of late Saturday — left her little to brag about in her caucus evening speech. She had to reach back to the story about braving a snowstorm during her outdoor announcement speech last year instead of pointing to anything positive in the Nevada results. Without much money, organization or a realistic expectation of doing well in South Carolina, she is likely to be an afterthought going into Super Tuesday.


The momentum of Buttigieg, who was Sanders' strongest opponent in Iowa and New Hampshire, stalled out in Nevada. He slipped into third place, well behind Biden. Long-shot candidacies need to continue to surge forward with unexpected results to overcome doubts. But Buttigieg’s success in Iowa and New Hampshire was not enough to change the minds of enough people in Nevada. A victory here for him would have been catalytic, but the Sanders blowout has halted his rise. He is still likely to be second behind Sanders in the delegate race, but the early states are all about momentum, not delegates.

While Klobuchar, Warren, and Buttigieg all did worse in Nevada than they did in the first two states, Biden did better, though a second-place finish 20 percentage points behind Sanders isn’t much to crow about for a former vice president. Still, being on the upswing, however gradual it is, going into South Carolina is essential for Biden. If he is the first candidate to definitively defeat Sanders in a contest, it could resurrect his campaign. And while Sanders did eat into Biden’s support among African Americans in Nevada, Biden still won that demographic overall.

Biden’s possible resurrection in South Carolina also makes the case for Mike Bloomberg tenuous. Bloomberg got into the race by arguing he would be a Bernie slayer if Biden collapsed. But Biden’s stubborn refusal to collapse means Bloomberg is now more likely to play the role of assisting Sanders’ march to the nomination — by keeping Biden wounded and the non-Sanders candidates further divided — rather than preventing it.

The race is Sanders’ to lose. He’s the best funded non-billionaire candidate. He has the best organization. He is winning the broadest coalition.

