LAS VEGAS — In a strategy reminiscent of the 2016 GOP primary fight that failed to stop Donald Trump’s rise, every Democrat running for president not named Bernie Sanders is vying for a second-place finish in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses.
Rather than predicting wins, four campaigns are talking up “strong finishes” in the third round of voting, after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
And the Nevada caucuses will be a setup for Super Tuesday, March 3, when contests in 14 states and entities will be held. That’s also the first time former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will appear on ballots, with the billionaire having already spent well into the eight-figures to advertise in delegate heavy states such as California and Texas.
Following Wednesday night’s debate in Las Vegas, senior aides to the Biden campaign spoke to reporters about his shaky road to the nomination, which has been marked by back-in-the-pack finishes in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries.
“We expect to come in first and are running to come in first in South Carolina,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a Biden campaign co-chairman, conspicuously not mentioning the Nevada caucuses just a few days away.
After being pressed by reporters, Richmond conceded, “We’re running for first place in Nevada.” But he stopped short of predicting how Biden will fare in either state, where another poor finish by the former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator could mean the end of his campaign.
“I know everybody wants to handicap the race. You guys want us to predict where we’re going to finish. We’re going to let the voters decide where we’re going to finish,” said Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield. “We are fighting for every vote.”
Those comments were echoed by Warren’s campaign staff, who defended her decision not to promise to back the candidate with the most delegates at the Democratic convention in July. That’s an implicit admission that they’re not confident about stopping Sanders at the ballot box through the end of the primary season.
The inability to articulate an exact strategy of how to stop Sanders draws comparisons to the 2016 Republican field, when a series of GOP establishment figures aimed for strong second-place finishes behind Trump, which only ended up further carving up the field and allowed the businessman with no political experience to claim the nomination.
Trump went on to win 41 primaries that cycle and won the nomination with nearly twice as many votes as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who came in second place. An organized effort to stop him never manifested as most of his opponents succumbed to infighting, attacking each other rather than Trump.
In another sign several candidates aren’t looking for first-place finishes, Warren and Buttigieg are leaving Nevada the day of the caucus, holding events in neighboring states such as Colorado. Neither seems prepared to deliver a victory speech.
And there’s good reason for that. Polling suggests Sanders will run away with a win on Saturday. A RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys in Nevada shows him with a 14 percentage point lead over his closest rival, Biden, who has 16% support. Buttigieg and Warren sit statistically tied in third place at 14% and 13.7% average support, respectively.
Early voting suggests the state could see record turn out from new voters, which the Sanders campaign says is key to its electoral strategy.
And each candidate is holding significantly fewer events than when they campaigned across New Hampshire and Iowa. Although the geography of Nevada, where most Democrats are focused in the far-apart cities of Las Vegas and Reno, makes it more difficult to hold multiple events a day, the lack of energy just days ahead of a caucus remains striking.
Biden, for example, held just two events on Thursday. The first was closed to the public and focused on gun control, while the second was a televised town hall on CNN. Neither involved the kind of retail politics that are standard in a caucus election.
Only the Sanders campaign currently appears to be talking about competing in every nominating contest, arguing that it had a chance to block any one of its rivals from securing a single win before the race was effectively over.
“I believe we will have a nominee likely be either March 4 or March 18, we will play these out, there’s a lot of delegates at stake over the course of March,” said Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. “I see the fact that a lot of Democrats are increasingly saying, ‘I am comfortable with Bernie Sanders.'”
