Live coverage of the Nevada caucus and South Carolina primary
Iowa went to Hillary and Ted Cruz. New Hampshire to Bernie and The Donald. Now, all eyes are on Nevada and South Carolina, where the Democrats and Republicans (respectively) will find out today who voters think deserves the keys to The White House.
In Nevada, Clinton is hoping a push to attack Sanders’ immigration record will carry the Latino vote while the former First Lady has also sought to portray the Vermont senators’ proposals as pipe dreams, especially given the fractious environment on Capitol Hill.
As CNN notes, Clinton began to organize six months ahead of Sanders and “a loss, or even another close finish with Sanders in Nevada, would further chip away at the aura of invincibility that once surrounded her path to the nomination.” Not helping Clinton’s cause with Latino voters is the fact that Sanders’ father was a Polish immigrant, a fact he’s been keen on highlighting in his campaign’s latest TV spots."While I understand that there are people who have differences of opinion with me on immigration reform, there is no justification, no reason, to resort to bigotry and xenophobia when we are talking about Mexicans or we are talking about Muslims," Sanders told a crowd at at the Democratic dinner at the Tropicana Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. "People can disagree about immigration reform, but in the year 2016, we will not allow the Trumps and others to divide us up and appeal to racism, which has done this country so much harm for so many years," he added.
In South Carolina, most polls show Trump holds a commanding lead over the rest of the GOP field and in typically brazen fashion, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination closed out his pitch to voters with a flourish on Friday, suggesting that Muslims should be executed with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and promising to bring back waterboarding which he says is “minimal, minimal, minimal” torture.
"It's bizzare," Marco Rubio said on Saturday of Trump's pig's blood story. "That's not what the United States is all about."
But incredulous as Trump's GOP rivals are at his meteoric rise to the top of the polls, he's clearly saying quite a few things that resonate with the electorate - at least for now. "A Trump victory in South Carolina on Saturday would send new shockwaves through the Republican establishment and possibly augur another strong showing for the front-runner in Southern states with a similar ideological profile on Super Tuesday, March 1," CNN remarks. "Despite an aberration in 2012, when the state's Republican voters went for Newt Gingrich, the South Carolina primary has historically been a barometer of party opinion, going for the eventual nominee in every other presidential primary since 1980."
In other words, if South Carolina goes to Trump, the rest of the field may just be "schlonged." Indeed, a victory in the state would all but prove that Trump is invincible. His lead has held up even after he called George W. Bush a liar last weekend (that's not generally something you want to be doing in South Carolina) and in a testament to just how strong the Trump juggernaut has become, the billionaire even went head to head with God himself when the Pope criticized his stance on immigration.
The bottom line: after Saturday, we will know whether the so-called "protest" candidates are set to bring about a political revolution in America, or whether the entrenched political establishment "empire" is set to "strike back" - as it were.
Here's PredictWise's latest read on South Carolina via Bloomberg:
Going into Saturday, Sanders and Clinton were running neck and neck but early results show Sanders pulling ahead.
Stay tuned for ongoing coverage and updates throughout the night.