When will Joe Biden accept it’s all over?

In Iowa, Americans had to wait the entire night before a caucus winner was declared. Today in Nevada, the wait was much, much shorter – with barely four per cent of the state’s precincts reporting, Bernie Sanders was announced as the victor. That the result was declared so decisively and so early on, was a fitting illustration of how superior the senator’s get-out-the-vote organisation was on the ground. Democratic voters in Nevada know Bernie, and they like what they see.

While MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was comparing a Bernie Sanders victory in the Democratic primaries to the fall of France in 1940, Bernie’s supporters were jubilantly celebrating a big win in a state with diverse demographics. Iowa and New Hampshire are states with overwhelmingly white electorates and are not at all representative of the Democratic electorate as a whole. Nevada, however, is the exact opposite of an Iowa or New Hampshire. For a candidate to win in Nevada, he or she must do one of two things: capture respectable support from whites, Latinos, and African Americans (the three largest demographics in the state), or sweep the board with white voters regardless of age, gender, educational attainment, and income.