Sanders wins sweeping victory in Nevada
By Patrick Martin
23 February 2020
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won a sweeping victory in Saturday’s Democratic Party caucuses in Nevada, defeating his closest rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, by a two-to-one margin and amassing 46 percent of the county convention delegates in an eight-candidate field.
The victory makes Sanders a strong front-runner to win the Democratic nomination ahead of the March 3 “Super Tuesday” contests, in which nearly 1,400 convention delegates will be selected.
Sanders is leading in the two largest states voting March 3, California and Texas, and is on track to win delegates in all of the more than 160 congressional districts where voting will take place.
More than 110,000 people cast ballots in the Nevada caucuses, with the final total likely to break the previous record, set in 2008 when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought to a near-draw in the state. Sanders’ support in the initial vote—essentially the popular vote among caucus-goers—was 33 percent, compared to 17 percent for Biden, 16 percent for Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and 13 percent for Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Senator Amy Klobuchar was in fifth place, with 10 percent, and billionaire Tom Steyer, who pumped $15 million into television advertising in the thinly-populated state, trailed with 9 percent.
The breadth and depth of the support for Sanders was summed up in this paragraph from the New York Times —a newspaper that has intransigently opposed Sanders throughout his political career, and recently endorsed Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Amy Klobuchar for the nomination.
After noting the failure of several other candidates to win support among diverse sections of the population, the Times admitted: “Only Mr. Sanders, with his uncompromising message that working-class Americans affected by injustice can unite across ethnic identity, has shown traction in both predominantly white Iowa and New Hampshire and the more black and brown Nevada.”
According to entrance polls, in which voters were interviewed as they went into caucus sites, Sanders won virtually every demographic—young, middle-aged and old, white, Latino and Asian, very liberal, liberal and moderate. African-American voters, about 10 percent of the total in Nevada, placed him second, narrowly behind Biden.
Sanders won despite two major political provocations carried out over the past week, engineered by the Democratic Party establishment with the assistance of the intelligence agencies and the corporate media.
The week before the vote was dominated by claims from the leadership of Culinary Workers Local 226, the giant local union whose members constitute the bulk of the workforce at the Las Vegas casinos and hotels, that Sanders’ advocacy of “Medicare for all” would take away their union-sponsored health insurance.
The rank-and-file workers ignored this “big lie” campaign, as Sanders won seven of the nine caucus sites set up on the Las Vegas Strip for workers to cast votes during their work shifts, and tied Biden in the eighth. There were anecdotal reports of union officials trying to convince workers to remove their “Unidos con Sanders” stickers and the workers refusing.
Read more at http://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-sanders-revolution-2/
