Sanders drives toward Super Tuesday delegate haul as establishment frets

Analysis: The national front-runner left Nevada for California because he has the luxury of trying to build a lead while rivals battle to be the one to take him on.

Feb. 22, 2020, 6:12 AM EST
By Jonathan Allen

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders spent most of the last day before Nevada's hotly contested caucus on Saturday rallying voters who can't cast ballots here.

With the motherlode of delegates to the national convention up for grabs in the March 3 Super Tuesday contests in 14 states, the Democratic front-runner's campaign decided its most valuable resource — Sanders' time — was best used in California on Friday. He campaigned at a high school in Santa Ana that is situated in a low-turnout Hispanic-majority congressional district in the morning and at an amphitheater in Bakersfield — the hometown of House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy — in the afternoon.

It's not that the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination has given up on Nevada — he's favored to win here and he returned to Las Vegas for a final outdoor rally on Friday night. It's just that mining votes in California is both a luxury he can afford and a more crucial aspect of his strategy than adding support in Nevada.

That's because the results in Nevada are all but certain to be a footnote in the story of whether Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, while the smallest of margins in California, Texas and other Super Tuesday states could be pivotal in his quest to walk into the party's convention this summer with either a majority or a large plurality of delegates.

The effect is that Sanders is working toward taking a commanding lead in the race while his establishment detractors fret in place.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/sanders-drives-toward-super-tuesday-delegate-haul-establishment-frets-n1140761