Nevada’s Democratic race has grown surprisingly close, stakes exceedingly high

Reporting from Las Vegas —  Hillary Clinton has done just about all it should take to win Saturday’s Nevada caucuses.

She began organizing early, visited the state repeatedly, hired some of its most talented political professionals and cultivated broad support from organized labor, Democratic leaders and the party’s grass roots.

But Clinton made one glaring mistake: She failed to take Bernie Sanders serious enough.

Most crucially, she allowed him to dominate the television airwaves in the state starting in December and continuing through his momentum-building performances in the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Now Clinton’s once-sizable lead in voter surveys has all but vanished, and both sides acknowledge the race has become exceedingly close.

It is far too soon to talk in terms of political life and death, or other such melodramas.

But a loss in Nevada, which once seemed almost inconceivable, would do grave harm to Clinton and establish the Vermont senator as more than a charmingly irascible distraction en route to her certain nomination.

Even a close Sanders finish could raise strong doubts about Clinton’s candidacy, especially if he manages to cut deeply into her presumed base among Latino, black and Asian American voters.

The two began a final burst of campaigning Thursday night in Las Vegas, appearing back-to-back at a nationally broadcast question-and-answer session where they appealed to the state’s large Latino and Asian populations by pledging to move quickly as president to overhaul the nation’s tangled immigration system.

Both said they would support a path to citizenship for millions of people who came to the country illegally but are otherwise law-abiding residents.

The television town hall, conducted in both English and Spanish, was just the sort of conversation that party leaders envisioned when they granted ethnically diverse Nevada one of a few privileged spots near the start of the political calendar.

The state has none of the storied history of Iowa’s caucuses or New Hampshire’s primary. But the vote here could go much further than either of those contests in shaping an increasingly unpredictable fight for the Democratic nomination.

The only other time Nevada mattered this much in the primary season was in 2008, the first time it held its early caucuses, when Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama fought to a split decision; Clinton won the popular vote while Obama edged her in the delegate count.

As in other early states, the fight here is less about delegates — there are only 43 at stake, out of nearly 2,400 needed to win the nomination — than expectations and perception.

Had Clinton handily carried both Iowa and New Hampshire, the fight for the nomination would have essentially ended, even if Sanders continued campaigning. But Sanders nearly beat Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, and then won New Hampshire in a landslide the next week.

Each of those setbacks came with caveats, however, or at least a rationale that Clinton and her supporters could use to explain away concerns. Iowa is overwhelmingly white and its Democrats have a broad progressive streak, which helped the more liberal Sanders. New Hampshire borders Vermont, giving Sanders an advantage as next-door neighbor.

That is why, even though many were stunned by the size and breadth of Sanders’ New Hampshire victory, there was nervousness but not full-fledged panic within the Democratic establishment, which strongly leans in Clinton’s favor.

Nevada is different.

This vast desert state was supposed to be Clinton’s fail-safe, or firewall, as it has been repeatedly described, assuredly stopping the Sanders conflagration before the flames spread.

“Clinton country” is how Dina Titus, the congresswoman from Las Vegas and a supporter of the former first lady and secretary of State, describes it.

Bill Clinton, running as “a different kind of Democrat” — which is to say a relative moderate — carried the state both times he ran for president. Hillary Clinton took vestiges of his support and remnants of her 2008 political organization and bolstered them by hiring veterans of Obama’s successful campaigns here.

She enjoyed a huge advantage over Sanders in name-recognition and, it was believed, an enormous edge among minority voters, who have been Clinton loyalists going back to her husband’s years in the White House.

That is why the stakes have grown so high.

Already facing doubts about his electability, a poor showing would send Sanders limping into the next contest in South Carolina, where he is already the underdog, and after that the sprawling set of contests stretching nearly coast-to-coast on March 1.

For most Nevadans, unaccustomed to playing such an outsized role in the presidential race, the caucuses will be an afterthought; only a small fraction of eligible voters are expected to turn out on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

But the outcome could go a long way toward determining whether Clinton’s firewall holds, or the Sanders insurgency blazes on brighter and stronger than before.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

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