Sanders’ Nevada win gives him clear path to nomination

Bloomberg

Bernie Sanders’ commanding win in Nevada dismantled the conventional wisdom about his level of appeal. It broadened his coalition to look more like the Democratic Party as a whole and will make it harder for fearful moderates to impede his path to the nomination.
The knock on Sanders always has been that his energetic but narrow base — young, mostly white, and largely disaffected — would make it easy for President Donald Trump to roll over him come November.
Nevada suggested otherwise, as Sanders, 78, won support from Latinos, African-Americans, union workers, people without college educations and voters up to age 45.
In Sanders’ view, that populist coalition is a mirror-image of Trump’s own but just as potent.
His double-digit win there also shows he can take pieces from the support of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, leaving them to split the anti-Sanders vote four ways — or five, including Michael Bloomberg, who joins the balloting on Super Tuesday, March 3. Sanders already is eyeing a win on Saturday in South Carolina, long thought to be Biden’s last redoubt.
“When we win South Carolina, I think it will be a bit of a major signal to the party about the fact that Bernie Sanders has brought together a coalition that is everything they thought he wasn’t, quite frankly,” Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said.
“Something that is multiracial, multigenerational, expanding, bringing new people into it.”