2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is projected to win Nevada’s Democratic caucus handily on Saturday night, giving his campaign another boost after his win in New Hampshire and strong showing in the unsettled Iowa caucuses.
With about 60 percent of the vote in, Sanders emerged as the victor by winning 46 percent of delegates, according to the New York Times.
A jubilant Sanders gave a victory speech to a roaring crowd during his campaign stop in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife, whom he introduced as “the next First Lady of the United States.”
“In Nevada we have just put together a multigenerational, multiracial coalition which is going to not only win in Nevada, it’s going to sweep this country,” Sanders told his cheering supporters.
“And in Nevada and in New Hampshire and in Iowa, what we showed is that our volunteers are prepared to knock on hundreds and hundreds of thousands of doors,” he continued. “That no campaign has a grassroots movement like we do, which is another reason why we’re going to win this election.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden is projected to come in second at 19.6 percent.
Fox News was the first to call the race earlier in the night, followed by NBC News at approximately 7:30, then ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and finally CNN.
The caucuses in the Silver State went smoothly for the most part, in stark contrast with their counterparts in Iowa, which still has not declared an official winner in the midst of a recanvass. The Nevada Democratic Party was slow to report official results, clearly wanting to avoid the errors that plagued the Iowa contest.
Nevada, with its large Latinx population, is the first state in the primaries in which candidates need to prove whether their campaigns resonate with more diverse communities than those in the heavily white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. According to early entrance poll results, Sanders was far and away the favorite among Hispanic voters.
