Hillary has the delegates in the bag this time, it is preordained.
It seems like yesterday.
The Hillary Clinton juggernaut arrived in Nevada last spring, making all the right moves. She hired Emmy Ruiz, a skilled operative who worked for Clinton and Barack Obama here in 2008 (Clinton won the popular vote but lost the delegate fight), to helm her effort. Ruiz brought a Nevada-centric team together, people who knew the state and its burgeoning Latino community, which made up 15 percent of the caucus universe eight years ago. And in May, Clinton held a memorable event, a roundtable with DREAMers, who just recently endorsed her for the nomination.
Nevada was Clinton Country, mostly because of her organizational strength designed to construct a firewall should Bernie Sanders do well in New Hampshire. Indeed, Sanders apparently couldn’t place Nevada on a map – he had no offices, no staff, no footprint at all.
Race? What race?
Now, one week before Nevada Democrats break the tie between Iowa and New Hampshire and decide if the Sanders Surge is real, yesterday has vanished and Hillary Clinton can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.[…]
After spending so much time touting the minority outreach, especially to Latinos, Team Clinton is now repeating the ridiculous and false mantra that Nevada is not so different than Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the whitest states in the union. It’s as if history doesn’t exist.
You know, the history where a guy named Harry Reid went to the Democratic National Committee in 2007 and persuaded key players that Nevada was not just the gateway to the West but to a more diverse place that reflected America’s changing demographics.
That’s why Reid has been so obviously offended by the Clinton canard, a fairy tale if you will, spun by a campaign that gave away its panic as the New Hampshire results became clear. From the top (campaign manager Robby Mook) on down (spokesman Brian Fallon) they pushed the false narrative that Nevada had an 80 percent white voter population. This is so far from true, and they know it (especially Mook, who – wait for it – ran Hillary’s campaign here in 2008).
They know that electorate was at least 30 percent minority, and they know it is projected to be closer to 40 percent this cycle. Nevada’s Hispanic population is about 27 percent, and it is barely a majority white state anymore – not, as Reid so memorably and wryly put it last week, like his 1976 yearbook.
So the story we are asked to buy is that Sanders will do well here because the demographics are so similar. Why does Hillary Clinton not like white people? Or why don’t white people like Hillary Clinton?