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Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucuses, A.P. Says: Live Updates
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont won the Nevada Caucuses, the Associated Press projected.
Six other Democratic candidates competed in Saturday’s caucuses: Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; the hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer; and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was not contesting Nevada.
Mr. Sanders was widely expected to win in Nevada, where 36 delegates are up for grabs. There remains a competitive race underway for second place. Here’s a look at what’s at stake for each candidate.
Despite scattered reports of volunteer shortfalls and busy phone lines, the caucuses apparently ran relatively smoothly. Results were slow to come out, though the Nevada Democratic Party said more were expected “soon.”
RESULTS FROM THE NEVADA CAUCUSES
Nevada Results | Updates From Reporters | Precinct Map | Delegate Count
The Associated Press has called the race for Bernie Sanders.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the stage at an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union Hall in Las Vegas for his caucus-night speech.
He does not appear to have won in Nevada, according to early results, but he told his supporters: “Y’all did it for me, Y’all did it.”
The former vice president dished out a series of barely veiled swipes at Bernie Sanders and Michael R. Bloomberg.
“I ain’t a socialist,” he said. “I ain’t a plutocrat. I’m a Democrat. And proud of it!”
The crowd cheered.
Why has it taken awhile to report the results of Nevada’s caucuses? In a nutshell, the state Democratic Party is tabulating and releasing more data this year than ever before to meet demands for transparency.
The party is using a hotline that the leader of each precinct — nearly 2,100 statewide — must call to report results. According to one caucus leader in Clark County, this is how those calls proceed:
The leader calls in, provides a precinct number and precinct-specific password, and reports the total number of caucus participants.
The leader then reports the number of first-alignment votes for each of the 11 candidates on the ballot (some of whom have dropped out of the race) and “Uncommitted,” in alphabetical order.
The party operator says, “First alignment, Michael Bennet, how many people?”
The caucus leader says “Zero.”
The operator replies, “Confirm zero for Michael Bennet.”
“Yes,” says the precinct leader.
The call-and-response is repeated for all 12 choices, through four categories: first alignment, second alignment, viability and number of delegates earned. “Very step-by-step,” the precinct leader said.
MINNEAPOLIS — Amy Klobuchar addressed about 150 supporters crammed into her campaign headquarters here.
Despite the fact that the early results out of Nevada showed her in sixth place, she tried to claim momentum coming out of the caucuses. “As usual, I think we have exceeded expectations,” she said.
She quickly pointed to why she had returned home to Minnesota on caucus night.
“Guess what one of the Super Tuesday states is?” she asked the crowd, rhetorically. She added: “I went and voted today, and I was actually amazed at all of the people there.”
Ms. Klobuchar also boasted of being attacked by President Trump. “By the way, for the first time ever, he mentioned me at a rally,” she said. “You know I’ve arrived now. You know they must be worried.”
A strong second-place showing for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden in Nevada would help inject new energy into his flagging campaign and stave off calls to drop out as he heads into a critical phase for his candidacy.
A fourth-place finish in Iowa and a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire undercut the central premise of the Biden campaign: That he was the most durable, electable Democrat to run against President Trump.
Once a runaway favorite to win in the South Carolina primary next weekend, Mr. Biden has slipped badly in the polls there. Further complicating his path are Pete Buttigieg and Michael R. Bloomberg, two rivals competing for the same moderate and independent voters as he is. Seeing Mr. Biden as a less-safe choice than they once envisioned, some voters have started to balk.
LAS VEGAS — After precinct leaders trying to report results reached repeated busy signals and jammed phone lines, the Nevada Democratic Party added new phone numbers for volunteers to call.
Ruben Murillo, a Henderson volunteer, said that after 15 minutes of not being able to reach an operator, he received a text message from the state party with additional phone numbers to call to report results.
Molly Forgey, a state party spokeswoman, said Nevada Democrats had “provided expanded capacity for the hotline to accommodate the influx of calls from precinct chairs.”
LAS VEGAS — The Nevada Democratic Party said it expects to have more results from its presidential caucuses soon.
“Caucuses are running smoothly, results are coming in, and we’ll have them up soon,” said Molly Forgey, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Democratic Party. “We’ve been prepared all along for a high influx of results as caucuses wrap up, and we’re working diligently to accommodate and continue processing the high volume of incoming results from precinct chairs.”
With some precinct leaders unable to reach the Nevada Democrats’ telephone hotline to report caucus results, the state party in the last hour has added phone lines.
Ruben Murillo, a precinct chair at Coronado High School in suburban Henderson, said he spent 15 minutes trying to report his results and getting a busy signal before he was finally able to get through to an operator.
Officials from the state party and the Democratic National Committee are working from a headquarters at the convention center at the Rio Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.
At 3:30 p.m. local time the state party launched its official results website, nevadacaucusresults.com, which is slowly adding more results.
LAS VEGAS — They each remember that moment, just after dawn on a September day in 1991, when they walked out of the Frontier Hotel and Casino. There was music and singing — “Solidarity forever,” went the song. That first day, the atmosphere was more like a celebration than a work protest. But the strike would go on to last six years, four months and 10 days — one of the longest labor disputes in American history.
There were fights along the picket line, with tourists throwing water and food at the strikers, who were more than willing to fight back. There were dozens of arrests. So much time went by that 107 babies were born to pickets and 17 people died during the strike.
They were fighting for wages, job security, pensions — and health care. In many ways those are the same key issues in the presidential campaign that comes on Saturday to Nevada, where health care has taken center stage in the contest, with Bernie Sanders forcefully pushing for a “Medicare for All” plan that would effectively eliminate private health care insurance. And in Las Vegas, talking about health care means talking about the Culinary Workers Union, the largest and most powerful union in the state.
The roughly 60,000 members of the union’s Local 226 rarely pay out of pocket for routine medical care. They can undergo surgery without receiving a hefty surprise bill months later. They can visit the same one-stop medical clinic for urgent care, vision, dental and the pharmacy. The clinic was a regular stop for many of the 2020 candidates.
So one way to understand why the leadership of the Culinary Union is fighting so hard against Medicare-for-all proposals is to look back to the 1990s. Read more below.
EL PASO — A buoyant Bernie Sanders made no reference to the Nevada caucuses during his rally in El Paso on Saturday, even as early results showed him on the path to victory.
Instead, he focused much of his remarks on his familiar policy proposals like “Medicare for All.” More than usual, he addressed his remarks to teachers and nurses, thanking them multiple times.
After briefly addressing an overflow crowd outside, Mr. Sanders took the stage to raucous cheers and chants of his name. As he often does, he then laced into President Trump, calling him a liar, sexist, racist and a religious bigot.
“We have news for Trump,” he said. “Love and compassion and bringing people together is a lot more powerful than divisiveness.”
As some of his rivals stayed behind in Nevada, Mr. Sanders was riding a wave of momentum into Super Tuesday states. After landing in El Paso around noon — two hours before the rally was set to begin — he did some interviews with local press and went for his daily walk, according to an aide.
He also told the crowd that he had visited the memorial at the Walmart where there was a mass shooting last August.
He has more rallies scheduled this weekend in San Antonio, Houston and Austin.
Texas may seem an unusual place for Mr. Sanders’s message to resonate, a fact he acknowledged onstage.
But he was also optimistic.
“I don’t believe it!” he declared, about Texas being a conservative state. “If working people, if young people, if the minority communities come out in large numbers, we can turn this state around.”
And, he added, “If we win here in Texas, Trump is finished.”
HENDERSON — Volunteer precinct leaders at Coronado High School were having problems phoning in results to the Nevada Democratic Party’s hotline.
“It’s been busy nonstop for 10 minutes,” said Ruben Murillo, a retired teacher.
Mr. Murillo was able to text a photo of his caucus worksheet to party headquarters, but the instructions require him to phone them in as well. “I’m just going to keep trying,” he said.
Down the hall, a precinct secretary, Phil Sobutka, had been trying to call for 30 minutes. His attempts to dial the hotline alternatively resulted in a busy signal or a message that said “your call cannot be completed.”
Still other precinct leaders seemed unaware of their responsibility to phone in their results.
Chas Stewart, a precinct chair here, said his instructions were to deliver his results to the caucus’s site leads, the two state party volunteers in charge of overseeing the 13 precincts at the school.
“As far as I know, those are my directions,” Mr. Stewart said. “I don’t know that I have to call anyone.”
Pete Buttigieg secured a spare county convention delegate Saturday afternoon in the Nevada caucuses after winning a tiebreaker with Bernie Sanders that involved a deck of cards.
Delegate math and rounding makes it such that in some cases, two tied candidates must vie for an outstanding delegate that has not been awarded. In Iowa, such ties were broken using a coin toss. But the Nevada Democratic Party has adopted a very Vegas way of dealing with such situations: using a card game in which the high card wins.
On Saturday, MSNBC captured a tiebreaker at a precinct in Reno involving Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders as it played out live.
In short, a representative for Mr. Sanders drew a 2 out of the deck while a representative for Mr. Buttigieg drew a 3; Mr. Buttigieg was subsequently awarded the spare county convention delegate.
These county convention delegates, which are derived from vote share, will be used to determine how many of the state’s 36 national convention delegates each candidate will receive.
And that is democracy, the Nevada way!
LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders appeared to be performing well at caucus sites for casino workers on the Las Vegas Strip. Mr. Sanders won precincts at the Bellagio and the Wynn, boosting him in sites filled with members of a labor union that has opposed his stance on health care.
At the Bellagio, Mr. Sanders received 32 county delegates and Biden received 19; at the Wynn, Mr. Sanders earned six while Mr. Biden earned three. No other candidates were declared viable at either of those two sites.
The wins for Sanders are remarkable given how much the powerful Culinary Union — the largest labor union in Nevada — criticized him and his campaign in the weeks leading up to the caucuses.
The union released a scorecard that described candidates’ positions on jobs, immigration and health care. While the union described the candidates as effectively the same on jobs and immigration, it noted that Mr. Sanders’s health care position, favoring “Medicare for all,” would eliminate the health care plan that many members treasure. “End Culinary Healthcare,” read the first bullet point beside Mr. Sanders’s name on the flyer.
But despite continued criticism from the union’s leadership against Mr. Sanders, many rank-and-file members said in interviews over the last week that they planned to back him.
NORTH LAS VEGAS — Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Saturday insisted that he remains the strongest Democratic candidate to face off against President Trump — an argument he will continue to make, he suggested, even if he comes in behind Bernie Sanders for the third time in a row.
“I beat him by going to — just moving on,” he said, when asked how he would defeat Mr. Sanders if he again claims victory here, as he did in Iowa and New Hampshire. “People want to know who’s the most likely to beat Donald Trump. And even the few polls that show Bernie tied with me or ahead of me, show me being the one that is most likely to be able to beat Trump.”
He went on to stress the importance of keeping the Democratic House majority and taking back seats in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Both Mr. Biden and Michael R. Bloomberg, in particular, have received endorsements from Democrats running in the most competitive down-ballot races who are worried that Mr. Sanders could threaten their standing if he tops the ticket.
“We’re raising some good money,” Mr. Biden said. “We’ve raised over a million bucks after the debate.”
Entrance polls can be misleading, but so far they point to a good day for Bernie Sanders. A majority of Democratic caucusgoers in Nevada support government-run health insurance, Mr. Sanders’s signature issue, over private plans, and he has the backing of around half of Latino voters, the largest nonwhite voting bloc by far.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has looked to black and Latino voters for a comeback in Nevada, was supported by far fewer Latinos, just one in 10, although he did well with African-Americans: Over a third supported him, compared with one in four who backed Mr. Sanders.
Tom Steyer, who invested significant time and money into courting minority voters in Nevada, may come away disappointed. Only one in eight black voters and one in 10 Latinos supported him.
Pete Buttigieg, a top-two finisher in the two early voting contests, was also struggling with Latinos: He was the choice of one in 10.
For voters who consider themselves very liberal, Mr. Sanders was the choice of more than half. Elizabeth Warren, who had a strong debate on Tuesday, earned 17 percent of very liberal voters, and Mr. Biden earned 9 percent.
No one showed up to caucus in-person at one of the precincts in the Rancho High School gym in Las Vegas.
HENDERSON — Elizabeth Warren stopped by Coronado High School, a caucus site here, just before the balloting was to begin on Saturday, bringing doughnuts from Dunkin’ and posing for pictures with supporters outside a high school.
A man thanked her for her recent debate performance against Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City. “As a former New Yorker, I’d like to say thank you for what you said to the mayor,” he said.
A woman wearing a headband decorated with two pennies — “two cents” is a chant among supporters of Ms. Warren’s two-cent wealth tax — posed for a picture with her.
Another woman also posed for a picture even though the camera being used to take it didn’t belong to her. “Take it anyway!” she instructed. (She soon returned with her own phone.)
“Need your help in this fight,” Ms. Warren told supporters.
As people came in for hugs, handshakes and kisses on the cheek, they displayed an unusual level of closeness with the candidate. “Can I get a selfie, Liz?” another woman asked. “This is exciting!”
Ms. Warren briefly made her way inside the building, where she thanked attendees.
“I just want to say to all of you, thanks for participating in democracy!” she shouted.
With that, she jogged to the van that would whisk her to the airport and then to Seattle, where she will hold a rally this evening.
HENDERSON — Richard Kastenbaum is the chairman for Clark County Precinct 1391, which is caucusing in a small classroom at Coronado High School.
His first order of business is to count the number of people in the room — about three dozen — and then have everyone stand in corners for their candidates.
Only after he enters the in-room totals into the Google Forms tool on his state party-owned iPad will Mr. Kastenbaum, a 68-year-old veterinary nurse, be able to see the early-voting totals for his precinct; the information will not be available until then.
Mr. Kastenbaum said the mood here is much calmer than in 2016, when he was a precinct captain for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“Back then in my precinct we had 165 people packed into a third-grade classroom,” he said. “This is much easier.”
LAS VEGAS — Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada stopped by Rancho High School with Krispy Kreme doughnuts to show his appreciation for the students who volunteered to help out with the caucus today.
“The fact that you’re taking the time on a Saturday morning is huge, and it says a lot about you,” Governor Sisolak said. “It gives me hope for the future.”
Reuben D’Silva, a social studies teacher at the school who ran for Congress in the 2018 midterms, was asked to put together the caucus site nine days ago by Will McCurdy, the state party chairman.
The first people Mr. D’Silva asked to volunteer were the students. More than two dozen signed up.
“They were all excited to participate, and I am supremely proud of them,” Mr. D’Silva said. “They’re at the driver’s seat of this political process.”
One former student, Eduardo Millan, 18, registered to vote for the first time on Saturday. He wanted to participate in the caucus not only to show what younger voters are thinking, but also to represent his parents who can’t vote. His parents migrated from Mexico almost two decades ago, but are not yet U.S. citizens.
“I’m grateful to be able to vote because so many voices get suppressed, including my family’s,” Mr. Millan said.
He added that he will be caucusing for Bernie Sanders because he believes he’s the candidate who can help the economy not be only for the rich but for working class families as well.
NORTH LAS VEGAS — Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived at a caucus site Saturday morning to cheers of “let’s go Joe!” from volunteers gathered in front of a high school here.
He was promptly greeted by a woman who exclaimed, “Mr. Joe Biden! I love you! Oh my goodness.”
Inside, the reception was more mixed, with a visible contingent of supporters for Bernie Sanders.
“I think he’s for the people,” said Teke Oruh, 41, an electrician who is not in a union. “Medical for everybody. Free medical for everybody.”
Gabriel Badilla, 28 and a health care worker, also cited Mr. Sanders’s support for Medicare for all, the single-payer proposal that Mr. Biden opposes.
“I like that he’s been fighting for the same thing for a very long time,” he said.
The issue of Medicare for all has been a contentious one in the Nevada caucuses. While it is popular with some voters, a number of union members and leaders have expressed deep concerns that such a proposal would upend the health care packages they have negotiated, a point Mr. Biden has been emphasizing in recent days.
Brittany Corder, 30, said she was deciding between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden. She liked Mr. Sanders’s approach to student debt, but appreciated Mr. Biden’s experience and his work as vice president to President Barack Obama.
She met Mr. Biden while waiting in line and said the encounter would factor in his favor.
“I just told him I’m freaking out,” she said. “A fan girl moment. He said, ‘thank you for coming out.’ I’ll have to text everyone I know.”
LAS VEGAS — It could be another late night.
Facing a shortage of volunteers at some caucus locations around the state, the Nevada Democratic Party has begun asking campaigns for help, according to multiple campaign staffers.
The state party has asked campaigns to send representatives or staffers to act as precinct chairs at different caucus locations. Others have been asked to assist with the check-in process.
Nevada Democrats had been working overtime to ensure that they do not experience the same delays and errors that plagued the Iowa caucuses, and a state party official said that they had an average of eight volunteers per site and more than 1,300 volunteers logged into the caucus calculator.
They did not respond to questions about the shortage in certain precincts, however, and the shortage in volunteers could result in the delay of results later Saturday night, something campaigns have been bracing for all week.
There also have been questions about how the nearly 75,000 early votes that were cast will be conveyed to the caucus sites. The state party has said that each precinct’s early votes will be pre-loaded onto the iPads that have been distributed to caucus leaders to tabulate results.
“It’s common and not unusual for campaign volunteers to help with running precincts on caucus day — this happened in 2016 and in 2008,” said Molly Forgey, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Democratic Party.
“We have thousands of volunteers working across the state today and this is not occurring at the vast majority of sites and precincts,” she said.
HENDERSON — At Coronado High School, the line to sign in to caucus snakes down two hallways and outside into the morning drizzle.
Mandie McCurdy, a lobby host at the Park MGM casino, is the site lead overseeing the 13 precincts holding caucuses here, and she has no idea how many people will show up or how long the process will take.
“Early voting blew us out of the water, as far as what to expect,” Ms. McCurdy said. “I’m not sure what that says about how this will work.”
Ms. McCurdy is in charge of a team of about 30 volunteers, a group that includes 13 precinct chairs who will oversee the caucuses. At noon local time, Ms. McCurdy will go outside into the rain and stand behind the last person in line — at which point everyone in line can caucus and anyone who shows up late cannot.
While Ms. McCurdy was managing the check-in process, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was chatting up caucusgoers. She said she expected the day to run smoothly.
“Listen, we learned from what happened in Iowa,” she said. “The Democratic Party has worked hard to ensure that we learn from whatever mistakes they made in Iowa.”
Ms. Cortez Masto said she caucused early last Saturday, but declined to say for whom she voted.
“I’m not going to make news on that,” she said.
Judy Zalte, a caucusgoer who turned up at this precinct, said she preferred Bernie Sanders four years ago but caucused for Hillary Clinton because she thought Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of winning the general election.
She won’t be making her decision that way again.
Ms. Zalte, a retired sales forecast analyst, said she would caucus for Elizabeth Warren, with Amy Klobuchar as her backup choice if Ms. Warren wasn’t viable in her precinct.
“Warren, I read her book and I think she’s about the best for working people right now,” Ms. Zalte said while waiting in line to register.
Carol Tipton arrived at the school three hours before the caucuses began and started working through a list of 15 supporters of Joseph R. Biden Jr. she needed to show up.
“I think I woke some of them up,” said Ms. Tipton, a precinct captain for Mr. Biden. “I called them and said I’m here supporting Joe and I hope you’ll come too.”
Ms. Tipton, a 75-year-old retired school administrator, said she’s not sure what to expect as caucusgoers arrive. The combination of 75,000 people voting early — which didn’t exist in 2016 — rain and Democratic enthusiasm to defeat President Trump has left volunteers here without much information about how caucus day will go.
“Four years ago we were only concerned about the people in the room,” Ms. Tipton said. “Now we don’t really know what to think.”
Powered by a strong debate performance, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign announced Saturday that it had raised $14 million in the 10-day period between the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses.
The fund-raising achievement, which the campaign announced in a tweet on Saturday afternoon, was double the $7 million goal the campaign had set before the Nevada caucuses.
Her team had said the $7 million was needed to fund organizing and advertising programs in Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday states. The campaign doubled that amount with the help of its best fund-raising day ever earlier this week, which came on the heels of a well-received debate performance by Ms. Warren.
During her time onstage, Ms. Warren urgently pressed Michael R. Bloomberg on his comments about women and the nondisclosure agreements he had reached with employees, and she also drew stark contrasts between herself and other candidates.
Her campaign later said she had raised almost $1 million during the debate itself and more than $5 million in less than 20 hours.
LAS VEGAS — Checking in from Rancho High School, where 11 precincts will be caucusing throughout the school, in the gymnasium, cafeteria, choir rooms and classrooms.
Jessica Marcos, 17, Rosa Medina, 16, and Yocelyn Escamilla, 17, are the precinct captains for Clark 4463.
They’re part of the Hispanic Student Union, and their biggest anxiety of the day is getting adults to listen to them.
“We’re teenagers, they’re adults,” said Rosa, a junior. “They might just not listen to us because we’re young.”
“You’ve just got to be confident,” Jessica said. “It’s about voice and body language.”
Jessica and Yocelyn, both seniors, will be able to vote in November for the first time. They loved learning about the caucus process and the candidates, stuff they hadn’t really paid attention to until they started preparing for the day.
“It’s been cool learning about the candidates, and doing what we can, before we can actually vote,” Yocelyn said.
But when asked if they would want to work in politics when they get older, Jessica said: “To be honest, this looks too stressful. So maybe not.”
Democrats had two days between their debate on Wednesday and the Nevada caucuses on Saturday to make a final pitch to voters. Some candidates, however, have already started looking ahead to Super Tuesday on March 3.
Photographers for The New York Times documented the drop-ins at restaurants, visits to volunteers and rallies. Take a look.
ABOARD THE SANDERS CAMPAIGN AIRCRAFT — Bernie Sanders, who is favored to win the Nevada caucuses, is on his way to Texas. The senator and his wife, along with staffers and traveling press, took off Saturday morning, before the Nevada caucuses began, for El Paso, where he was to hold a rally in the early afternoon.
He was scheduled to hold rallies in San Antonio, Houston and Austin before the weekend was over, and then to head to South Carolina.
Mr. Sanders badly lost the Texas primary in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who secured 65 percent of the vote. But his campaign feels much better about his chances in the Super Tuesday state this year.
Mr. Sanders has focused on courting Latino voters across Texas, and his campaign has barnstormed the state. Mr. Sanders himself was in Mesquite less than eight days ago.
The Texas swing also underscored how much emphasis the campaign is placing on the delegate-rich states that will vote on Super Tuesday. Texas is the second-biggest prize on March 3, after California, where Mr. Sanders has also spent a significant amount of time and resources. His campaign is also focusing in particular on North Carolina and Virginia.
Here’s a quick look at where each of the top Democrats competing in the caucuses will be on Saturday and what type of events they are holding:
Bernie Sanders will be in Texas. He plans to hold a rally in El Paso in the early afternoon and then a second rally in San Antonio in the evening.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will attend a caucus day event in Las Vegas in the afternoon.
Elizabeth Warren plans to be in Seattle for a meet-and-greet event in the evening.
Pete Buttigieg will attend a caucus-day rally in Las Vegas in the afternoon and then fly to Denver for a town hall there in the evening.
Amy Klobuchar held a caucus kick-off event in the morning in Las Vegas and will attend a volunteer appreciation event in Minneapolis in the evening.
LAS VEGAS — A weather update that may function as a turnout update: it’s raining in Las Vegas. And it’s been coming down steady and hard for more than an hour, just as people might have been considering whether to show up at a caucus.
In a desert city where it rarely rains, this could truly keep some people at home. Folks out West are legitimately surprised by and worried about slippery roads.
Then there are people who need to take public transportation to show up at caucus sites. Are they really about to stand in a steady stream of rain to do so?
Democrats in Nevada have been quietly worried about this forecast all week, which is another reason campaigns and operatives were encouraging people to vote early. It was sunny skies for all four days of early voting.
You say Ne-VAH-duh, I say Ne-VAD-uh. But which is correct?
Politicians and journalists have been botching it for years, but we’re here to help. Take the quiz below to test your knowledge of how to pronounce Nevada (and the names of other states).
LAS VEGAS — Hours before caucusing was set to begin, Amy Klobuchar held her final event in Nevada, rallying supporters at her campaign headquarters tucked in the back of an office complex far from the glitz of the Vegas Strip.
She was set to leave for Minnesota hours later, well before results would be counted.
“Today is a big day and I’m excited,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “But it is the beginning of the next chapter of our campaign.”
For the candidate who has been building on a surprise third-place showing in New Hampshire — “third, and a solid third,” she reminded the crowd here — Ms. Klobuchar spent as much of her 20-minute speech focused on Nevada as she did on the future.
“We have set our sights not just on Super Tuesday but beyond,” she said, boasting of television ads airing in multiple Super Tuesday states and her upcoming campaign trip to North Dakota, which caucuses a week later, on March 10.
“I challenge my opponents, how many of them have done a rally in Fargo?” she said. “This is my second one.”
Ms. Klobuchar has kept a relatively low profile in Las Vegas this week, holding her last public event in the city on Tuesday, before campaigning in Colorado on Thursday and then Reno and Elko, Nev., on Friday.
She also met privately with employees of the Mandalay Bay casino on Friday morning, many of whom were employees at the time of the mass shooting that took place there in 2017.
After her remarks, Ms. Klobuchar said that setting up her Nevada operation on the fly — when so much of her campaign cash came in after her well-reviewed debate performance in New Hampshire — meant that she was “coming from behind here.”
But she was defiant that no matter the result in Nevada, she had momentum going forward.
“We’re viable no matter what,” Ms. Klobuchar told reporters as she negotiated the crowd.
She was, however, prepared for a late night. Though she said she didn’t anticipate the errors that plagued the Iowa caucuses to repeat themselves in Nevada, she was ready for results to take a bit longer than expected. That’s why, she said, she was planning to leave the state early.
“Vegas and Reno are known as knowing how to count, so hopefully we will get some numbers out of here,” she said. “I don’t know when, people think it might be quite a bit later, and that’s why most of the campaigns are going on to other Super Tuesday states like we are.”
LAS VEGAS — In one last push to get Latinos out to vote, the Nevada Hispanic Caucus and Mi Familia Vota, a civic engagement group, hosted a Spanish-language caucus training and forum Friday night at the offices of UA Local 525, the plumbers, pipefitters and service technicians union.
There was a taco truck outside, mariachis to greet potential caucusgoers as they walked in and an impressive spread of aguas frescas and horchata.
The groups also held a mock caucus in which people voted for their favorite Latino remedies for the flu: Sopa de Pollo, Ajo, Sprite, and Vicks VapoRub.
Vicks won the first alignment, with only a few people showing support for ajo, or garlic, and just two saying that chicken soup was the best remedy. No one caucused for Sprite.
In the second alignment, all the garlic supporters joined team chicken soup.
Vicks won nine delegates. Garlic earned one.
Chicken soup was not viable.
LAS VEGAS — As Nevada Democrats worked to bolster their presidential caucuses and avoid Iowa-style chaos, the state party on Friday asked all caucus site leaders to sign nondisclosure agreements preventing them from talking to the news media.
Nevada Democratic Party officials said it was standard procedure to make such requests, because paid and volunteer caucus site leaders are often given information about the party’s strategy and methodology. The existence of the agreement was first reported by CNN.
The agreement specifically bars volunteers and staff members working the caucuses from talking to the news media, even if they are unnamed.
“If I am a volunteer and answering phones at the N.S.D.P. office or volunteering at an official N.S.D.P. event, I am a representative of the N.S.D.P. and am not authorized to speak to the press unless given permission by the executive director or communications director,” the agreement says.
It goes on to specify in all caps that “THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Twitter suspended about 70 accounts on Friday that were part of a coordinated, paid effort to push out positive messages about Michael R. Bloomberg on the grounds that the accounts violated the social media platform’s rules.
The suspensions, confirmed by Twitter on Friday and first reported by The Los Angeles Times, came just days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign had been hiring workers to frequently post supportive messages about the former mayor of New York on their personal social-media accounts.
“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in a statement.
The Bloomberg campaign issued its own statement in response: “We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts,” it said, adding that the content in question was being shared through an app “and was not intended to mislead anyone.”
LAS VEGAS — In her final rally before the Nevada caucuses on Friday night, Elizabeth Warren took the rare step for her of criticizing Bernie Sanders by name, calling him out for not supporting plans to fully roll back the filibuster.
A voter who invoked the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas asked her about how she was planning to actually change gun policy.
“We have to treat gun violence like the public health emergency that it is,” she said. “But I’m not just about what is the right thing to do, I’m about how to get it done.”
She noted the challenge of passing such legislation in a fiercely divided Senate, if she relied on the current rules that require 60 votes for major legislation. “It is time to get rid of the filibuster,” she said.
“Other people who are running for president, and I say this just as a factual statement, like Bernie, who say they want to make real change, but they will not roll back the filibuster,” she said. “Keep in mind what that means: They have given a veto to the gun industry to prevent real change and gun reform, a veto to the pharmaceutical industry, a veto to the insurance industry.”
Ms. Warren also addressed the ongoing concern among some voters that a woman is unlikely to be elected president.
“Every time somebody tells you a woman can’t beat Donald Trump — well I don’t know about a woman, but I’ll tell you, Elizabeth Warren can beat Donald Trump.”
After spending days in Las Vegas, including for her standout debate performance on Wednesday, Ms. Warren gave in to a gambling reference in looking ahead to a potential fall match-up with the president.
“If anyone doubts whether or not I can fight him on a debate stage, I think we have the video from Wednesday,” she said of her verbal dismantling of Michael R. Bloomberg. She added of Mr. Trump there was a “betting line” to be had: “I think there’s a 50-50 chance that Donald Trump looks at debating me and doesn’t even show up.”
The Nevada caucuses could give some candidates significant momentum. Or, if they play out like the caucuses in Iowa earlier this month, they could lead to prolonged confusion and calls for recounts.
The Nevada Democratic Party has been scrambling to put in effect safeguards and redundancies in its caucuses to avoid the myriad issues that plagued Iowa. Here is a look at how the process works in Nevada, and the lessons from Iowa that show us what could potentially go wrong.
Polling shows that Bernie Sanders is the heavy favorite to win the Nevada caucuses, but the question is the same as it was in New Hampshire: by how much?
And the contest could be just as consequential for his rivals — many of whom see a chance for a surprise second-place finish.
A Las Vegas Review-Journal/AARP Nevada poll released last week showed Mr. Sanders at 25 percent in the state and Joe Biden at 18 percent, good for second place. But it also found that all four of the other major candidates — Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer — were in the low double-digits.
It has been over a week since that data was collected, so there is a chance that one of those lower-tier candidates could have experienced an 11th-hour surge.
If Ms. Warren’s commanding debate performance on Wednesday propels her to a strong finish in Nevada, it could give her candidacy a needed boost looking ahead to Super Tuesday on March 3, when she has a chance in major states like California and Massachusetts (her home state).
Mr. Steyer and Mr. Buttigieg have spent the most time in Nevada out of all the candidates, and both will be in a tough position if they do not show at least some formidability there.
Mr. Biden, meanwhile, is hoping for no less than second place, as he looks ahead to a must-win South Carolina primary next week.
Mr. Steyer has been advertising heavily in both Nevada and South Carolina, and he is polling near the top of the pack in the Palmetto State, largely thanks to recent gains among black voters. A strong showing in Nevada could give a boost to his long-shot candidacy.
The Nevada caucuses will open for check-in Saturday morning and be called to order later in the afternoon. But tens of thousands of Nevada residents have already voted, giving a very significant early boost to turnout.
Indeed, the Nevada Democratic Party has said that more than 70,000 people participated in early voting, which closed in the state on Tuesday. By comparison, only about 84,000 Nevada Democrats participated in the caucuses in 2016.
The other early-nominating states have so far been something of a mixed bag when it comes to turnout.
The New Hampshire primary on Feb. 11 set a record for turnout with more than 296,000 Democratic ballots cast, substantially higher than in 2016, when the turnout was 250,983, and a slight uptick, of about 9,000, from 2008. But the state’s voting-age population has been increasing, important context when looking at this year’s record.
The turnout numbers in Iowa were not nearly as heartening to Democratic Party officials. In that state just 176,000 people showed up to caucus earlier this month, a mere 3 percent more than in 2016 and a significant drop from 2008.
LAS VEGAS — At a Friday night rally at a middle school on the eve of the caucuses, Joseph R. Biden Jr. laced into two chief rivals in starkly direct terms.
He has traditionally been reluctant to draw sharp contrasts with his opponents at campaign events, and his remarks reflected the urgency of the moment for Mr. Biden, who came in fourth place in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and is counting on a second-place finish in Nevada.
“They’re not bad folks,” he said after jabbing both Bernie Sanders and Michael R. Bloomberg. “They’re just not Democrats.”
As he has been doing all week, he criticized Mr. Sanders’s record on gun control, citing his past votes against the Brady bill, which required background checks for gun purchases.
“He voted to give the gun manufacturers an exemption from being able to be sued!” Mr. Biden added, to boos. Mr. Sanders has also supported gun control efforts.
Mr. Biden also said that “Medicare for All,” the sweeping single-payer health care option Mr. Sanders champions, would eliminate private insurance. Such an approach, he argued, would endanger the health care plans the union members in the crowd negotiated, a major point of contention in the race here.
And Mr. Biden lashed Mr. Bloomberg, who has been a Republican and an independent, for his past criticisms of President Barack Obama — and over his ads that feature Mr. Obama, which Mr. Biden suggested were misleading because they suggested the former president was backing Mr. Bloomberg.
Mr. Biden, the onetime national front-runner who has plummeted in some polls, appeared to relish the scrutiny that some of his rivals are now facing.
“The good news is, the field is narrowing,” he said. “The better news is, you’re all taking really close looks at the other guys now.”
Throughout his 30-minute address, Mr. Biden appeared energized, and sometimes his volume veered toward shouting, as he spoke in a modestly sized gym that was mostly, but not entirely, full, with many attendees wearing union T-shirts.
Climate activists briefly interrupted, sparking loud chants of “Joe! Joe!” from Mr. Biden’s supporters.
“It’s not a Trump rally, it’s OK,” Mr. Biden said, inviting the protesters to speak with him afterward, before saying, “surprise me and have some manners.”
The protesters were escorted out by police in a confrontation that, in one case, briefly turned physical.
The Friday evening rally capped a day of smaller, retail-style events, including a stop for peach cobbler and fried food, and a cookout and precinct captain training with supportive union members in Las Vegas. There, Mr. Biden emphasized his longstanding support for labor and argued that the first two nominating states — Iowa and New Hampshire — were not representative of the nation.
“This campaign is really just getting started,” he said. “We’re finally at a place where there are folks that represent the country, look like the country. And by the way, they’re good folks in Iowa and New Hampshire. But this looks like America.”
The Nevada caucuses are upon us and only one thing appears clear: Bernie Sanders is the favorite to win, in the estimation of his own campaign and all the others. His early-state momentum, populist message and appeal to Latino voters appear to have converged in a potent way here.
Beyond that, there is little consensus about how convincingly Mr. Sanders might win, or what kind of chance there might be for an upset, or who is likeliest to finish second and third.
If uncertainty is nothing new in this race, it may be even more pronounced in Nevada. The state has changed its caucusing procedures since 2016, allowing for early voting, which is likely to drive up turnout to record levels. There are more major Democratic candidates competing here than in any presidential race since Nevada received early-state status in 2008. Recent public polling has been scarce.
And the debate on Wednesday added a whole new element of unpredictability. After her weak finish in New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren dominated the evening, clobbering Michael R. Bloomberg and raising the hopes of her supporters in a state she long hoped to win outright. Any post-debate bounce, however, could be blunted because so many Nevadans already voted early.
Even the second-place spot in Nevada is seen as an important prize. Joseph R. Biden Jr. has staked his candidacy on the prediction that he would do better once the primary calendar reached more diverse states, and few states reflect the country’s diversity as well as Nevada. Mr. Biden is looking to the state to help stabilize his campaign.
The caucuses are also a first test of whether Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar can extend their success in overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire into more culturally varied parts of the country — an existential challenge for both of them as Super Tuesday approaches.
And there is a wild card in Tom Steyer, the poorer of the two billionaires in the race, who spent heavily on television commercials here but failed to qualify for the final debate. Despite his presence onstage Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg is not competing in Nevada.
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