Ryan Lizza writes:

On Saturday in Nevada, Bernie Sanders laid waste not just to his five main rivals but also to every shard of conventional wisdom about the Democratic presidential primaries.

You could see the dominoes of punditry cliches falling inside the caucus rooms. At the Bellagio Hotel, which held one of several “Strip caucuses” meant to be easily accessible to hospitality workers along Vegas’ main drag, 75 Sanders supporters gathered along the wall of a ballroom.

The powerful Culinary Union, which opposes Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and spent the final weeks of the campaign in a high-profile fight with his campaign, was supposed to weaken him. And yet the Sanders’s ranks were speckled with red-shirted Culinary members. (Overall, Sanders won 34% of caucus-goers from union households, besting all of his rivals.)

Sanders wasn’t supposed to be able to break through with black and brown voters, but the group was racially and ethnically diverse. (Sanders won 27% of African Americans and 53% of Hispanics across the state.) The Sanders movement is supposed to be limited to those crazy college kids who don’t remember socialist as a slur. But there were plenty of older Sanders backers at the Bellagio chanting “Bernie” along with their 20-something comrades. (Sanders won every age category in the state except Nevadans over 65, which he ceded to Joe Biden.)

Sure, the numbers are tiny. In a state of 3 million people, turnout of over 100,000 participants is considered enormous. Candidate events here on the days leading up to the caucuses were sleepy affairs, with fewer attendees than in Iowa and New Hampshire where the big cities are a fraction of the size of Vegas.

But the Sanders victory still exploded a lot of myths. He was said to have a ceiling of 30% or so. Remarkably, against a much larger field of candidates Sanders is poised to come close to the same level of support as he did in 2016 in a one-on-one race against Hillary Clinton, to whom he lost 47%-53%. (He was at 46% with a quarter of precincts reporting as of this writing.) He was said to be unable to attract anyone outside his core base. But he held his own with moderate voters (22%) and won across every issue area except voters who cared most about foreign policy, who went with Biden.

All of this makes the results of the Nevada caucuses, which in the past have not been treated with the same importance as the contests in the three other early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — matter more this year. They have helped settle lingering questions about Sanders’ appeal.

More important, Nevada exposed his four main rivals as weak, divided, and grasping at increasingly tenuous arguments about how they can still win. [Continue reading…]