Who Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada?

As to be expected, The New York Times is tattooing the Sanders campaign as a sure loser following Hillary's solid victory on Saturday in the Nevada caucuses. Nevada was important for Bernie, and in many ways it seemed ready-made for his anti-establishment candidacy, given the state's higher-than-average union density and its long suffering since the 2008 financial meltdown. But Hillary beat him, and she beat him handily in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its heavy Latino population and its union casino workers.

And herein lies a mystery. Based on entrance and exit polling, Bernie won the Latino vote in Saturday's caucus by eight points. Then how is it that Hillary beat him by 11 points in Clark County? This has created a kerfuffle with number-cruncher Nate Cohn, "No, the Polling Doesn’t Prove Bernie Sanders Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada," rejecting the polls. Charles Blow summarizes in his anti-Bernie column, "Bernie Sanders Hits a Roadblock":

According to the entrance poll, Sanders also won the Hispanic vote, but this is where some prominent poll watchers took exception to the poll’s accuracy. 

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted: 

“Based on the results in Clark, the precincts in ELV, and the overall entrance poll error, I do not believe Sanders won the Hispanic vote.” 

ELV, or East Las Vegas, is the largely Hispanic part of Clark County, by far the most populous county in the state, where actual results showed Clinton winning handily. 

Nate Silver tweeted support for Cohn’s analysis: 

“We share @nate cohn skepticism about entrance poll finding that Clinton lost Hispanics in Nevada.”

I think this anomaly can be explained by a passage from the post-election dispatch written by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Beats Bernie Sanders in Nevada Caucuses":

Her support among labor also ran deep, even though the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 members, many of whom are Latino, declined to endorse a candidate. But on Thursday, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who also remained neutral, said in an interview he had spoken to D. Taylor, the head of the union’s parent group, to make sure its members could have paid time off to participate in the caucuses, a move that operatives in the state believed helped tip the race in Mrs. Clinton’s favor. 

She overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Sanders in the caucuses that were held at six major Las Vegas casinos, including Harrah’s, the Wynn and New York-New York, which heavily drew working-class minority voters.

Caucuses are not secret ballots. Leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, despite a professed neutrality, got time loss for its members to caucus for Hillary. The members did so, but many on the way in and on the way out identified as Bernie supporters. That is why there is a disconnect between the polling and the actual outcome in Clark County.

What does it all mean? Certainly not how Team Clinton is spinning the win this morning as somehow foreshadowing an inevitable triumph in the primary. Hillary won 19 delegates to Bernie's 14. That's it. Even Cohn sees the Nevada results as proof that the Sanders campaign has reason to hope he can diminish Hillary's advantage among people of color:

The actual election returns in Las Vegas’s Clark County hint at a different story. Analyzed neighborhood by neighborhood, they suggest that Mrs. Clinton might have won the Hispanic vote by a comfortable margin. She won about 60 percent of delegates in heavily Hispanic areas, a result that calls the finding of the polling into question.

There is not much evidence, though, that Mrs. Clinton won Hispanic voters by the sort of landslide margin that she did eight years ago. That’s a good sign for Mr. Sanders, who needs to make up for the huge swing among black voters, who have gone from uniformly for President Obama to uniformly for Mrs. Clinton.

So we need to take with a grain of salt Patrick Healy's frontpage headline this morning, "Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb." There is plenty within the guts of Healy's story which should give the Clintonistas pause:

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded. 

Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

“She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks’ time on Super Tuesday,” said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race. 

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle’s presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running. 

“The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. “We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers.” 

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters. 

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

The support for Bernie is not going to evaporate. It is hardcore. It provides a solid foundation of funds and grassroots all across the country. For example, I attended a "Labor for Bernie" rally yesterday at 4 PM -- this is 4 PM on a Sunday afternoon, a time when a lot of people are doing grocery shopping and getting ready for the work week -- and the hall was packed. More chairs repeatedly had to be hauled in to accommodate the overflow. Several state legislators were in prominent attendance. This is not a Howard Dean type of movement that is going to suddenly collapse. This is a long haul operation of people who want to tear down a system that is multiplying wars and planetary destruction faster than most can track.

The fight is just getting started. What happens, as Healy alludes, when the FBI comes back with evidence of wrongdoing? How about the transcriptions of those Goldman speeches? Hillary's corpse might appear reanimated but the stench is still there.

As for Trump, only the most committed dead-enders can deny the obvious: After Super Tuesday the GOP nomination will be Trump's.

The fantasy being peddled by Republican apparatchiks is that the race will turn into a two-way contest between Rubio and Trump, and Trump, who has never proven that he can muster much more than 30%, will fall to the more centrist candidate. This is all summarized in Nate Silver's "Trump Optimists And Trump Skeptics Are About To Go To War."

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes Cruz is going to get out the race, and he is not. He's got too much money.

The Bloomberg Doomsday Scenario

The goalposts now move to Nevada and South Carolina where Hillary will attempt to remake herself as a champion of the black underclass, as Lambert Strether notes in his "Water Cooler":

“Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving a neighborhood watch representative and law enforcement officers, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message” [Politico].

After failing to deliver a clear victory in Iowa or a decent showing in New Hampshire, Team Clinton, and the pundits of the mainstream, are banking on the allegiance of black and brown voters. With Republican voters seemingly ready to embrace Donald Trump whole hog, the ruling elite has a lot riding on Nevada and South Carolina. If she shows continued morbidity in these two states, March 1 Super Tuesday might not be the knockout blow for Sanders that Hillary's campaign is promising.

Yes, a lot is riding on the remaining weeks of February. Meanwhile, overseas Russia and Syria are routing the U.S. backed jihadis and U.S. clients, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are having a tantrum. Enormous pressure is being put on the Obama administration to up the ante with either anti-aircraft missiles or ground troops. As Aleppo returns to government control, NATO warships will now patrol the Aegean to try to prevent more refugees from landing on European shores. In Afghanistan, U.S. ground troops are -- unbelievably -- back in Helmand Province to try to save Poppystan from falling completely to the Taliban.

Things are spinning out of control. In 2016 we should see some sort of dramatic paradigm shift (if we haven't already).

A doomsday scenario we can look for is an election tossed into the House of Representatives, something that hasn't occurred in the United States since the election of 1824 when John Quincy Adams was selected over the Donald Trump of the day, Andrew Jackson. This becomes a possibility if Mike Bloomberg runs for president as an independent. The latest news is that he is "itchin'" to make a go of it.

I don't think Bloomberg will run unless Hillary continues her collapse, which will begin in haste if her Dixie firewall collapses. Hillary now is the champion of a sick and dying global regime. Can her corpse continue its ambulatory miracle of reanimation? So far it has been less miracle and more smoke and mirrors. But money can turn the world upside down. Let's see what happens in Nevada.

New Hampshire Post-Mortem: Hillary, a Corpse on Life Support + Trump's Apotheosis

While the United States might not be a closed society in the classic George Orwell 1984 police state sense, it is one where its inhabitants are subject to a great deal of centrally managed thought control. Every country propagandizes its own population. But the U.S. has long prided itself on its free press, enshrined as it is in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

This morning drove home to me the extent to which we do not have a free press. Waking up I went online to see what the vote totals were in New Hampshire. On the home page to the nation's newspaper, The New York Times, there was a modest headline "Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Win in New Hampshire," with most of its related coverage devoted to Trump's victory. Nowhere can the reader easily find the normally ubiquitous color chart graphic of the vote total.

I cooked a pot of whole wheat pasta at 3:45 AM to kill time until I could amble downstairs to the front stoop where the national edition of The New York Times usually arrives by 4:15 AM. I wanted to see if the lack of statistical information about the New Hampshire results was replicated in the home edition of the paper. Sure enough it was.

Out of curiosity I took a brief spin around the World Wide Web. I couldn't find my way past the Wall Street Journal's paywall, but the Washington Post has the vote totals on its home page. Also, if you Google "New Hampshire results," you'll find them. You just wont find them readily available in "the newspaper of record."

Here they are: Bernie Sanders 60.0%, Hillary Clinton 38.3%. Trump won by 20 points too:
Donald Trump 35.2%, John Kasich 15.8, Ted Cruz 11.6%, Jeb Bush 11.1%, Marco Rubio 10.5%.

The Times, having recently endorsed Hillary, is of course doing everything it can to keep Sanders from enjoying a deserved bounce for his commanding victory in a state that has always been kind to the Clintons. As Patrick Healy summarizes online this morning in "New Hampshire Takeaways: Trust, Experience and Message Count":

New Hampshire Abandoned the Clintons

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the New Hampshire loss for Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. The state was a political bellwether for Mr. Clinton, putting him on the path toward the Democratic nomination in 1992 and backing him in the general elections that year and in 1996.

Voters again came through in a big way in 2008, when Mrs. Clinton won here and revived her candidacy after losing the Iowa caucuses to Barack Obama and John Edwards. But on Tuesday night, Mrs. Clinton lost New Hampshire’s big cities: Concord, Manchester and Nashua. She lost most of the small towns. She lost in the north country and the seacoast, along the western border and through the White Mountains.

She lost many major demographic groups, performing best among the older and wealthier, and among people who care about experience and electability in November. But these voters were small in number compared with Mr. Sanders’s legions. Mrs. Clinton won 112,404 votes in New Hampshire in 2008 in a tough race against Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards; on Tuesday, she won about 89,000 to Mr. Sanders’s 139,000.

It should be apparent now that Hillary is a corpse animated by the millions in corporate donations and filthy lucre from the sheikhs of al-Saud. If she somehow manages to win the primary she will do so by tapping deep pools of public ignorance. And while normally it is never wise to underestimate the limited vision of the average voter, 2016 represents something different. Hillary is losing not only among the white working class, but women as well. So she can't even buttress her campaign with the the two pillars of her failed 2008 run. Let's go back to Healy:

Working-Class White Voters Are Up for Grabs

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Obama in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other states partly because of solid support from working-class white voters. But Mr. Sanders prevailed with these voters in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Sixty-eight percent of white noncollege graduates supported him, as did 65 percent of people from families earning less than $50,000. On the Republican side, the same groups of voters broke strongly for Mr. Trump. 

Mrs. Clinton says she thinks she can still win back these voters with her policy proposals for paid family leave and for capping prescription drug costs for some Americans, but so far she has not performed well with less affluent voters in New Hampshire or Iowa.

Democratic Women Aren’t Rallying Behind Clinton

Something went wrong between Mrs. Clinton and the women of New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders won 55 percent of their votes compared with Mrs. Clinton’s 44 percent, with married women and especially unmarried women breaking his way, according to exit polls. 

Those results rocked the Clinton campaign, given that Mrs. Clinton is running to become the first female president and enjoyed the support of many of the most powerful women in the state, including its governor and its Democratic senator. Moreover, women provided the margin of victory for Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 primary victory here. 

Clinton advisers are confident that her support will rebound with women in Nevada, South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states that vote on March 1. But some of Mrs. Clinton’s friends are nervous: They did not expect her to lose New Hampshire so badly, and for women to be such a big factor in her defeat.

Clinton is in real trouble. Hence the morning after blackout of her 20-point loss in the newspaper of record.

Another warning sign for Hillary is found in John Broder's "Primary Exit Polls Show Terror Fears Aided Trump and Young Voters Helped Sanders":

Mrs. Clinton topped Mr. Sanders by a wide margin among voters who said the next president should generally continue President Obama’s policies. But they accounted for only about four in 10 Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire — far fewer than in Iowa. Instead, just as many voters said the next president should change to more liberal policies — and eight in 10 of these voters backed Mr. Sanders. Almost two-thirds of Democratic voters said they support replacing the current health care system with a single taxpayer-funded plan for all Americans.

My way of thinking is that Obama is not all that popular among the Democratic base. Since Hillary has hitched her campaign wagon to him, it appears to be a losing strategy.

Needless to say Hillary's backers are starting to freak out. Team Clinton very well might lose Nevada, having beat Obama there in 2008. But Team Clinton is assuring its supporters that all will be right come Super Tuesday, possibly a sacrifice of campaign staff will be performed to appease the distraught.

As for Trump, Healy says:

Trump Voters Are Real

Mr. Trump led in many Iowa polls before the Feb. 1 caucuses, but he came in second place when it came time for the actual voting. That result raised questions about whether all the people crowding into Trump rallies were true-blue supporters or celebrity worshipers. 

But on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump’s supporters proved that they were committed and enthusiastic enough to turn out for their candidate. He won among first-time voters in a Republican primary, as expected. But he also won among Republicans, independents and people who have voted in past party primaries. 

He did especially well with voters who preferred candidates who “tell it like it is.” But he lost to Mr. Kasich, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Mr. Bush among voters who wanted a candidate who “shares my values.” In the end, Mr. Trump won 30 to 40 percent of the vote among many demographic groups, showing that he can win primaries and caucuses when a large Republican field splits the vote.

Trump is popular in the South. Cruz has a lot of PAC money supporting him. Unless Establishment donors give up their "hot chick" obsession with Marco Rubio and coalesce behind Kasich, Trump and Cruz are going to continue to lead the field.

As for the Democratics, let's look and see what happens at the Nevada caucuses come February 20. Rank'n'file labor activists are overwhelming behind Bernie.