Minority vote has large role in Nevada outcome
Hillary Clinton, need jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.”
Clinton won all six at-large precincts set up on Las Vegas Strip for on-duty casino and hotel shift workers on Saturday, Nevada Democratic Party results showed. At the Paris casino, the caucusgoers were almost exclusively Latino and black — and Clinton snagged more than twice the delegates Sanders received.
Sanders did better than expected with Latino voters, entrance polling showed, but Clinton carried off a big win with African Americans — a segment of the population she’s counting on to help her win in the Southern states that vote next month.
It was a blow to Sanders, who had hoped Nevada would prove he has what it takes to carry more diverse states. Sanders issued a statement shortly after the race was called, saying he had spoken to Clinton “and congratulated her on her victory here in Nevada.”
In a speech to supporters, he said he still believes he has the momentum in the Democratic contest nationwide. “I believe that on Super Tuesday we’ve got an excellent chance to win many of those states,” he said, and his nomination at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia will mark “one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States.”
Leomia Dillon, a 55-year-old guest service operator at the Paris casino, was ecstatic about Clinton’s victory. “I like what she stands for,” said Dillon, who is black. “She stands for women, and equal pay for women.”
The results were a disappointment to Dennis Torh, 47, who works in housekeeping at the hotel at the Paris casino. “Bernie Sanders stood with MLK and has great experience. He wants everyone to be able to afford a college education,” said Torh, who is black and has no college degree.
Clinton backers said she proved she’s better at retail campaigning than political observers give her credit for. She personally visited the back of the house at casinos to ask shift workers for their votes, including a midnight visit to Caesars Palace.
In the final days before the Nevada caucuses, the candidates took turns trying to make a dent in the others’ popularity, especially with black and Latino vot- ers. Minority voters held the cards in Nevada, where 48.5% of the population is non-white.
Clinton repeatedly stressed her closeness with President Obama. Sanders accused Clinton of pandering to blacks, telling the Black Entertainment Television cable network last week that “she loves the president, he loves her and all that stuff. And we know what that’s about. That’s trying to win support from the AfricanAmerican community where the president is enormously popular.”
A photograph surfaced Friday that helped Sanders counter Clinton surrogates’ claim that he was absent from the civil rights battle. The dug out of its archives a photo of a 21year-old Sanders, a University of Chicago student at the time, resisting arrest during a 1963 protest over racial inequality.
Immigration was another point of contention last week. Team Clinton attacked Sanders for voting against a 2007 immigration bill; Sanders defended his opposition, saying he believed its guest worker provision to be morally wrong. The dispute prompted a leading Latino rights activist, Brent Wilkes of the League of United Latin American Citizens, to call Clinton’s criticism “unfair.” Wilkes told BuzzFeed News: “It’s hard to separate Hillary’s record from (her husband’s). The Clintons, when they were in office, weren’t exactly friends to immigrants.”
Clinton’s trustworthiness, and her closeness to the powerful financial industry leaders of Wall Street, were other big themes in the closing days.
Clinton stirred trouble for herself by seeming to hedge when asked in a CBS News interview on Thursday if she’d echo President Carter’s pledge to never lie to the American people. She answered that she doesn’t think she has ever lied. “I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever will,” she told CBS anchor Scott Pelley.
Sanders continued to push Clinton to release transcripts of her closed-door speeches to Wall Street. Thursday night, during the MSNBC forum in Las Vegas, Clinton said she’d be “happy to release anything I have when everybody else does the same.” Jacobs also reports for the Des Moines Register.