The NPR Politics Podcast - Bernie Sanders Projected to Win Nevada Caucus

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

Senator Bernie Sanders is the projected winner of the Nevada caucus, according the Associated Press."In Nevada, we have just put together a multi-generational, multiracial coalition, which is going to not only win in Nevada, it's going to sweep this country," Sanders boasted at a rally in San Antonio, Texas, shortly after news outlets reported his caucus win. Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg warned that nominating Sanders could cost Democrats seats in down-ticket races.This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, campaign correspondents Asma Khalid and Scott Detrow.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid. I'm also covering the campaign. And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has decisively won the Nevada caucuses. In Nevada, we have just put together a multi-generational, multi-racial coalition, which is going to not only win in Nevada, it's going to sweep this country. Scott, you've been traveling all over with the Sanders campaign. What does the win tonight mean for his campaign? I think it further cements something we've been talking about for a while on this podcast, and that Bernie Sanders is really the frontrunner at this point in time for the Democratic presidential nomination. If you think about

the fact that he won more votes than anybody else in Iowa and effectively tied in the delegate total with Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders has now basically won the first three states, a narrow victory in New Hampshire and a pretty resounding victory, as far as we can tell at this point, with a lot of results still to come in here in Nevada. And that really sets him up to do well and to be out ahead of a still muddled rest of the field in the coming weeks when a lot more delegates are at play. And the entrance poll data that we saw going into the caucuses showed Sanders winning voters across the board. Yeah, this is something that his campaign has been very excited to see the results from Nevada from. I think they feel really shortchanged in the big picture conversation

about who appeals to what kinds of voters, arguing that for a long time, Bernie Sanders has really had a deep appeal with a lot of Latino voters, especially younger Latino voters, and they felt like Nevada would really show that out. And from what we can tell, they are absolutely right. He is going to finish with a much higher percentage of the vote share than he did in Iowa and New Hampshire. And at least in one state this week, that answers the question of whether Sanders can grow his support beyond a quarter of the electorate. Asma, I want to note, just because I can hear it sounds like you're at a campaign event. Maybe it sounds like they're breaking down a campaign event.

Exactly. I was going to say, I hope we don't get kicked out of here soon. But I was with Joe Biden at his celebration party in Las Vegas today. Well, we should note, Biden currently, with only 4% of the precincts reporting, is in a distant second place. But his campaign used the evening to declare a victory of sorts. You know, I know we're not on the final results yet, but I feel really good. You put me in a position, you know, the press is ready to declare people dead quickly.

But we're alive and we're coming back and we're going to win. So Biden feeling pretty good with his finish? They do. I mean, it was a real sense of a victory party here in terms of just the energy that you felt in the room. Shortly after he began speaking, I heard a supporter yell out, come back, kid. And I guess that's in reference to the fact that he had, you know, fifth and fourth place finishes in the first two voting states. So his campaign feels fairly confident. A campaign official told me that they feel that they are going to come out of this state with delegates. But look, I also do think this is a really interesting sort of narrative shift for them, because for a long time they had been saying, look, we're going to do

better as this race moves on to more diverse states. Well, Nevada was a clear test of that. And I would make the argument that Bernie Sanders did definitively better, it seems, across the board with different demographic groups. And as you move into Super Tuesday, it's not just like you can win only African-American voters. You need to be winning Latino voters, Asian voters, white voters, a whole multiracial coalition. And Sanders so far seems to have built some of that multiracial coalition more so than anybody else. One of the questions I had going into tonight was where Senator Elizabeth Warren would do because she had this sort of attention grabbing debate performance and we saw that it delivered candidates like Amy Klobuchar a lift before the New Hampshire primary.

Would there be a translation to Nevada? And I'm not sure we saw an effect of that play out. Well, we did in one sense as we wait for the final result. And I think those will be more clarifying in the order of Biden, Buttigieg and Warren, as opposed to Sanders, who I think we're all pretty sure had a big win here tonight. As we wait for those results, we saw results that really do matter almost as much in terms of how candidates can compete going forward. And that is that she has raised north of $12 million in the day since that debate midweek where Warren did really strongly. And that's like a real lifeline to her campaign, not an exaggeration. She had less than $3 million in the bank in the latest campaign finance reports that we got earlier in the week. She was not spending that much money on ads at all in the Super Tuesday states. And now she has gotten a real boost and will able to continue to make her case, even though it's not clear what exact lane she fits into and what space

she has right now as Democrats try to figure out who's going to be their nominee. Also, I think Asma Klomentum, the Klobucharge, I don't know what we were calling it, but it really seemed to slow down tonight. She didn't really have much of a performance in the caucuses. No, that's right. And she actually delivered her speech today from Minnesota, her home state, which is going to be voting on Super Tuesday. You know, she is like some of the other candidates in this field, I think, really struggling to build a diverse coalition. And, you know, I think that that is why the Biden campaign feels fairly confident, despite some of his poor finishes early on, is they feel like they and Bernie Sanders are really the only candidates who have proven to have success with diverse voters. Speaking of diverse voters, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who's had troubles with Latino and African-American voters, that bore out tonight. He did not seem to have a particularly strong

showing based on the numbers we have so far, but he did use his speech to sort of make news of its own right, taking a pretty sharp line of attack, a new line of attack against Senator Sanders. And that is a real difference from Senator Sanders' revolution with the tenor of combat and division and polarization leading to a future where whoever wins the day, nothing changes the toxic tone of our politics. Not just attacking Sanders, but also going on to say that Sanders is the kind of candidate that could hurt Democrats all the way down the ballot. I believe the only way to truly deliver any of the progressive changes that we care about is to be a nominee who actually gives a damn about the effect you are having from

the top of the ticket on those critical frontline House and Senate Democrats that we need to win. Look, beyond the generic concerns from Democratic leaders about a Sanders nomination, you are increasingly hearing specific concerns about the type of appeal or lack of appeal that he would have in those exact districts that won Democrats' control of the House of Representatives. Buttigieg is now making that case. You can ask why it took until after three states weighing in to make that case. You can ask why for most of last year, the rest of the candidates never really viewed Bernie Sanders as a serious threat. It's interesting, as Buttigieg was speaking, I got a text from a Republican who worked for Marco Rubio in 2016 who said, it's too late.

I was on the show in 16. OK, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk more about where the race goes from here. Maddie Safai here, host of Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. Listen for new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines all in about 10 minutes every weekday. So you come away a little smarter or at least you look that way on trivia night. Listen and subscribe now to Shortwave from NPR. And we're back. And a week from today, the South Carolina Democratic primaries will take place.

And I wonder for both of you what you see the collective effect, Iowa, New Hampshire, now Nevada. What does that tell you about the dynamics going into the next contest? So, Sue, I feel like it's tricky to exactly answer that question because it depends on which candidate you are. I mean, if you're Joe Biden, you're essentially camped out in South Carolina for the next week because he has banked this campaign on the fact that South Carolina is his firewall and that he will do well with African-American voters. And so as a reporter who's going to be following him, I will say I think it's going to be one of the most fascinating weeks of his entire political career to see what happens with him in South Carolina next week. But a lot of these other candidates, if you look at their schedules, they all know that just a couple days after South Carolina votes,

you've got Super Tuesday and you've got just massive, massive delegate halls in places like California and Texas. So they're spending some of their time in states beyond just South Carolina. Well, tonight was proof that candidates' minds are already past Nevada. Most of the candidates weren't even in the state, Scott. Yeah, and Sanders spent all of yesterday in California until just one rally in Las Vegas in the evening. He was in Texas for most of the day today. There are so many things that were taken as a given fact for so much of 2019 that just like are not true or not applicable now. And that is the fact that so many people were arguing that South Carolina would be the most important early state. They would get more attention than Iowa,

New Hampshire, and that just didn't really necessarily play out. And I think it's important because it's kind of Joe Biden's last stand. But beyond that, Buttigieg, his campaign has really had a hard time connecting with voters in South Carolina. He is looking forward to Super Tuesday. And Bernie Sanders is going to be holding a lot of events in South Carolina over the next week. But he'll be in Texas and North Carolina and Virginia and Massachusetts and California, really keeping his eye on those March 3rd states where his campaign, as his campaign manager put it to me last night, expects to open up a delegate lead that they don't expect to ever give back? I think one of the big questions for me is Nevada was kind of this test case theory, I feel like, in the power of Latino voters.

And if it turns out that Bernie Sanders really did so well, you know, sort of definitively well here in Nevada, the big question I have is if he can do equally well with Latino voters in California and Texas. And I say that in part because I feel like the Biden campaign has focused very heavily on the strength that his campaign could potentially have with black voters in South Carolina. But it's actually Latino voters who a majority of them are going to vote in just the next couple of weeks. I just wonder if other campaigns have really substantively paid attention to that community in the way that the Bernie Sanders campaign has. Which is especially important because it's California and Texas, two delegate-rich Super Tuesday states.

And states where Sanders has spent a lot of money in advertising, Michael Bloomberg has as well, but other than that, no other candidate is really spending that amount of money on ads at this particular moment with those races looming so closely. You bring up Michael Bloomberg, which is a good point to mention because he was not on the ballot today. He will not be on the ballot in South Carolina, but still a major factor going forward despite a rather lackluster debate performance. Yeah, and I think that was part of the Buttigieg speech tonight, right? Buttigieg is trying to make the case, and I think if Biden does finish a notable second, it erodes that case just a little bit, that at this point in time, he is the alternative to Bernie Sanders. You can have a Bernie Sanders nominee,

or you could have Pete Buttigieg is the case that the Buttigieg campaign is trying to make. And we should remember that up until we get the full sense of the delegate allocation here in Nevada, at this particular moment, as we talk, and it won't be the case tomorrow morning, but at this moment, Pete Buttigieg has more delegates than any other Democrat. One thing I am watching as the days go forward is if more Democrats start to sound like Pete Buttigieg did tonight, if more and more Democrats, quote unquote, establishment Democrats start to raise alarms about what Sanders nomination could mean for the broader party? I mean, we certainly heard Joe Biden make a similar argument for a while. He has long

warned about putting a Democratic socialist at the top of the ticket. And even tonight, he had this quip about his opponents. He said at one point, I ain't a socialist. I ain't a plutocrat. I'm a Democrat. And it was very clear that he was referring there to Bernie Sanders and the former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Okay, well, I think that's going to be a wrap for tonight. I hope the two of you get to squeeze out a little bit of enjoyment left in your weekend.

That's right, we're going to Mariah Carey. We are not going. I had the idea, and then we couldn't go until tonight, but I have to fly out of the state. So Asma's going, a couple other people are going. I cannot go, and I'm so deeply sad. I will be spreading my wings and preparing to fly out of Nevada as Asma goes to this concert. Well, thank you so much for all your hard work on the ground.

It's good to hear from you guys, as always. That's a wrap for tonight, but the podcast will be back in your feeds, as always, on Monday. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I can put more Mariah Carey lyrics into my answers. And I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.