Nevada caucuses on Saturday: Who Will Win?

In a normal political cycle, the candidate with more delegates than the others would be called “the front-runner”. In this political cycle, that candidate may not even qualify for any delegates when Nevada Democrats caucus on Saturday February 22nd.

Pete Buttigieg leads the Democratic field with 23 delegates. Bernie Sanders trails by two with 21. Elizabeth Warren has 8, Amy Klobuchar has 7 and Joe Biden has 6.

The polling in Nevada is sparse, and for a lot of reasons, it’s very hard to poll in Nevada. A lot of the people who you might get in a poll can’t vote in Nevada. They are people with residency in other states (mostly California), people living in Nevada who are from Asia or Europe and aren’t citizens, and an enormous population of workers who are in the country illegally. That last population screws up a lot of pollsters because when they are asked if they are eligible to vote they often say “yes” to avoid follow up questions about their immigration status.

In addition, Nevada’s population is extremely divided between those who live in the cities (mostly Reno and Las Vegas) and those who don’t. The population of Nevada is over 3 million. The population of Clark County (the Las Vegas metro area) is over 2.2 million. Reno’s population is over 400k. If you want to poll for statewide contests like Governor or Senator, you can get good data just polling in Vegas and Reno. But the caucuses are different.