Harry Reid allies to Team Clinton: Don't slam Nevada's caucus
Harry Reid allies to Team Clinton: Don't slam Nevada's caucus
Her campaign's attempt to downgrade expectations backfires in the pivotal caucus state.
By Annie Karni
02/15/16 05:20 AM EST
With five days to go until the Nevada caucuses — once viewed as Hillary Clinton’s Western firewall — Sen. Harry Reid and his allies are incensed at the wounded Democratic front-runner.
The reason: the Clinton campaign’s attempt to downgrade expectations there by whitewashing the diverse state.
The campaign’s recent assertion that Nevada is “still a state that is 80 percent white voters” — in other words, a state that looks a lot like Bernie Sanders’ base — is simply wrong, Reid allies claim. But more galling than that, they say, it undermines the entire rationale for the caucuses’ existence: The state was pushed to the front of the election calendar eight years ago solely because Reid lobbied for better demographic representation than the overwhelmingly white early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Harry Reid pushed hard to move Nevada near the front of the primary calendar precisely because of its diversity,” a source close to the Senate minority leader said last week after the Clinton team pushed the “white Nevada” narrative in a series of conferences calls to donors and lawmakers on the Hill, as well as in television interviews (Clinton operatives have since appeared to back off that argument).
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/clinton-hillary-nevada-blowback-219295#ixzz40Ijx6pBz
