How much trouble will Hillary Clinton be in if she loses in Nevada, where Democrats will caucus on Saturday? How close does Bernie Sanders need to come in South Carolina, which votes a week later? And which states are really “must-wins” for Sanders in March, April and beyond? 
 
 We can try to answer all of those questions with the help of the gigantic chart you’ll see below. On the left-hand side of the chart, you’ll find a projection for how each state might go if recent national polls are right, with Clinton ahead of Sanders by about 12 percentage points nationally. The right-hand side is more crucial: It shows how the states might line up if the vote were split 50-50 nationally. Since the Democrats’ delegate allocation is highly proportional to the vote in each state, that means Sanders will be on track to win the nomination if he consistently beats these 50-50 benchmarks. Conversely, Clinton will very probably win the nomination if Sanders fails to do so, especially since superdelegates would likely tip a nearly tied race toward Clinton. 
 
 The starting point for these estimates is state-by-state polling from Morning Consult, a non-partisan polling and media firm that has surveyed about 8,000 Democrats online since Jan. 1. That’s a lot of responses, although not enough to provide an adequate sample size for all 50 states; while there are about 800 respondents from California in the sample, for instance, there are only a dozen or so from Montana. 
 
 The solution is to blend the polling results with other data. In particular, I used exit polls to determine the nonwhite share of the Democratic electorate in each state and how each state lines up on a liberal-conservative scale (Sanders does better in white and liberal states). I also included the amount of money raised by Clinton and Sanders in each state in individual, itemized contributions, and their ratio of Facebook likes. In states like California where there’s an adequate sample size from the Morning Consult polling, the polling gets a fair amount of weight, but in the smaller states the other factors predominante. (For a more technical explanation of how this is accomplished, check out the footnotes. ) 
 
 Don’t get too attached to these: The state-by-state estimates are pretty rough. But they’re calibrated in such a way so as to provide a reasonable benchmark of what a 50-50 race would look like. Maybe Michigan is less favorable to Sanders than this estimate holds, for example. That’s fine, but it means he’ll need to make up ground in another state. 
 
 What about the states that have already voted? We estimate that in a 50-50 national race, Sanders would win Iowa by about 6 percentage points, and New Hampshire by 26 points. He didn’t quite hit those targets in either state, although he came close — several percentage points better than you’d expect from his current national polling. As we’ve said, however, the real challenges for Sanders lie ahead. 
 
 A quick look at the calendar 
 
 Nevada. Nevada has a fairly high nonwhite population, but it isn’t especially liberal. Clinton was also well ahead of Sanders in the (relatively small sample) of interviews Morning Consult conducted there earlier this year. It’s possible that Clinton will be hurt because the state holds a caucus, although we don’t have a lot of evidence yet about which Democrat that benefits. In other words — and as much as her campaign might try to avoid admitting it — it’s a state that Clinton “should” win. Conversely, a Sanders win would be a sign he has staying power. 
 
 South Carolina. Clinton is the overwhelming favorite in South Carolina, but her margin of victory could be a useful benchmark for where the race stands nationally. Suppose, for instance, that Clinton winds up winning by 17 percentage points in South Carolina (a bit closer than most polls have it). Would that be a good result for her or a bad one? Our chart projects that Clinton would win South Carolina by 11 points in a 50-50 race, so she’d be doing a little bit better than that benchmark. But not a lot better: Such a result would still suggest that the national race had tightened. 
 
 Super Tuesday (March 1). Clinton is likely to compile lots of delegates from the seven Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, although Oklahoma — which is quasi-Midwestern and relatively white — might be Sanders’s best shot at an upset. Sanders should win Vermont by a huge margin, meanwhile. That leaves the Minnesota caucus, Colorado caucus and Massachusetts primary as the races to watch; they’re the sorts of states Sanders absolutely needs to win to have a shot at taking the nomination. 
 
 Big-state primaries on March 8 and March 15. This is probably the most important eight-day stretch on the Democratic calendar. Michigan votes on March 8 (as does Mississippi), followed by Florida, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri on March 15. Together, these states will put 857 pledged delegates at stake, or more than 20 percent of the Democrats’ pledged total. (Pledged delegates, chosen by voters, are distinct from superdelegates.) Based on current polling, most of these states favor Clinton either narrowly or substantially, so Sanders will have to make up ground, perhaps enough to win a couple of them outright. 
 
 Favorable terrain for Sanders in late March. A series of Western states vote between March 22 and April 9, as does Wisconsin. Almost all of them figure to be favorable to Sanders — including Wisconsin, where he was already almost tied with Clinton in the polls before his New Hampshire win. A possible exception is Arizona, where Clinton beat Barack Obama in 2008 and where the electorate can be tricky to predict. 
 
 New York, California and a big blue finale. With some exceptions — Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana will be interesting to watch — the last quarter of the Democratic calendar mostly resides on the coasts. And there are some big prizes: New York, Pennsylvania and California foremost among them. All three offer advantages and disadvantages to each candidate. For instance, will California’s left-wing politics, which help Sanders, prevail over its racially diverse population, which helps Clinton? Sanders probably needs at least two of the three states, and maybe all of them given Clinton’s lead in superdelegates. A win in California on June 7 would also carry symbolic power, as it’s the last state to vote, possibly allowing the winner to claim a mandate from the Democratic electorate. 
 
 But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If Sanders can hang tight with Clinton in Nevada on Saturday, his chance of eventually notching a win in California and securing the nomination will look a lot better. 
 
 And check out the “perfect” Democratic stump speech. 
 
 Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast. ||||| CLOSE Hillary Clinton scored a resounding victory against Bernie Sanders in Saturday's Democratic primary in South Carolina, seizing momentum ahead of the most important day of the nomination race: Super Tuesday. Video provided by AFP Newslook 
 
 Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a presidential campaign event in Chicago on Feb. 25, 2016. (Photo: Tannen Maury, European Pressphoto Agency) 
 
 WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders has said he'll battle Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination through the last contest in June. 
 
 But the Vermont independent’s ability to stay competitive faces a major test — both mathematically and demographically — on Tuesday, when 11 states and American Samoa hold primaries and caucuses. 
 
 At stake are 865 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention. That’s 36.3% of the 2,382 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. 
 
 Of those 11 Super Tuesday states, Sanders sees a path to victory in Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont, where he's polling an average 75 points ahead of Clinton. He also expects to win significant numbers of delegates in the other six states, because Democrats award delegates proportional to a candidate's share of the vote in each state. 
 
 One problem for Sanders: The Super Tuesday states where he sees possible victories offer only one-third of pledged delegates at stake that day. Clinton also is way ahead in support from superdelegates, the 712 unpledged elected officials and party leaders who decide on their own which candidate to back. 
 
 Following his 47.5-point loss in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, Sanders has 65 pledged delegates and Clinton has 91. Counting superdelegates, Clinton now has 544 total delegates, compared to 85 for Sanders.​ 
 
 Even after his crushing defeat in the South Carolina primary Saturday night, Sanders said his campaign is "just beginning." 
 
 "Now it’s on to Super Tuesday," he said in a statement Saturday. "In just three days, Democrats in 11 states will pick 10 times more pledged delegates on one day than were selected in the four early states so far in this campaign. Our grassroots political revolution is growing state by state, and we won't stop now." 
 
 Super Tuesday is “critical” for Sanders, said David Wasserman, who analyzes delegate counts for The Cook Political Report. 
 
 “He’s got to stay within striking distance of Hillary Clinton or else she’ll put the race away,” Wasserman said Thursday. “By our estimates, if Clinton were to match patterns of support she’s received in primaries to date, she would win between 75 and 100 more delegates than Sanders on March 1. That would mean that Sanders would need to win approximately 58% of the remaining pledged and undeclared superdelegates to tie Hillary Clinton by the end of the primaries. That’s virtually impossible to do.” 
 
 Hillary Clinton on Feb. 16, 2016 in New York. (Photo: Bryan R. Smith, AP) 
 
 The Sanders campaign believes superdelegates will switch their allegiance as he amasses pledged delegates, and his supporters have launched independent campaigns designed to ensure that happens at the convention. 
 
 If Sanders leads in pledged delegates by the end of the process, “the pressure on the superdelegates not to go against the will of the voters is going to be enormous,” said Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior media adviser. 
 
 In the 2008 Democratic presidential race, about two-dozen superdelegates switched their support from Clinton to Barack Obama. But Clinton started that race with a much smaller lead in superdelegates than she has now, said Anthony Corrado, a government professor at Colby College in Maine. 
 
 “I think we’re not going to see major movement from the superdelegates who are already committed to Hillary, barring some extraordinary event,” he said. 
 
 Super Tuesday also will test Sanders' ability to win support from large numbers of minority voters in southern states such as Texas, Georgia and Alabama. Minority voters have favored Clinton in national polls, and African Americans were key to her victory in South Carolina. 
 
 Sanders says his support among Latinos is growing. His campaign officials cite entrance polls showing he won the Latino vote at the Nevada caucus, which Clinton won overall. But Clinton campaign officials and others say those results weren’t reliable. 
 
 “If you can’t win non-whites in this party, you cannot win the nomination,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who ran former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. “There’s just no way he keeps it close if he’s running this poorly among nonwhites. The issue isn’t which states can he win, it’s can he change that. They’re running out of time to do it.” 
 
 Clinton has received hundreds of endorsements from African-American and Hispanic elected officials and is counting on strong minority support as a firewall against Sanders. She's pitching herself as the candidate most closely aligned with President Obama, who is popular among Democrats in states that will vote in March. 
 
 “As the campaign moves towards states with more diverse electorates in March, we expect Hillary’s strength among these groups will quickly translate into a major electoral advantage,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, wrote in a Feb. 9 open memo. 
 
 At a recent Sanders rally in Norfolk, Va., Dominique Conway, 20, an African-American student at Hampton University who will vote in Virginia on Tuesday, said Sanders is more vocal than Clinton about issues affecting black voters. 
 
 He hasn’t been afraid to call for criminal justice reform or “say the word black,” she said. 
 
 But she also said many African Americans don't know Sanders well. Conway's age group — where Sanders has strong support — learned about him through social media, a major focus of his campaign's outreach efforts. 
 
 “But my parents? They’re not on Twitter,” she said. 
 
 Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton take the stage before a debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 11, 2016. (Photo: Tom Lynn, AP) 
 
 Sanders delivers paid messages through online ads, text messaging and email, and he’s advertising statewide in Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. 
 
 He aims to connect with minority voters through his personal biography as the son of a Polish immigrant and through support from unelected leaders, including former NAACP president Ben Jealous and movie director Spike Lee, Devine said. 
 
 Tuesday likely will be Clinton’s “best day on the calendar,” but Sanders aims to win over the long haul, Devine said. He predicted “decisive showdowns” in Michigan on March 8, Wisconsin on April 5, Pennsylvania on April 26, and in other states. 
 
 The campaign will make a big effort in Kansas and Nebraska before their March 5 caucuses, and California could decide the election when it votes in June, he said. 
 
 “We’ve got a lot of time,” Devine said. “By the time we get to California, I think we’ll be winning Latino voters by a significant margin and I think we will not have these kinds of deficits with African-American voters.” 
 
 Follow @ngaudiano on Twitter. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/213CgaR ||||| BOSTON — Bernie Sanders’ campaign is desperately fighting to prove that Super Tuesday isn’t his final stand. 
 
 The outlook is grim: He likely needs comfortable wins in at least five states to realistically keep pace in the delegate hunt. Coming off a deflating loss in Nevada and a thorough pummeling in South Carolina, Sanders’ brain trust views March 1 as a swinging gate that could either reveal — or effectively close off — his path to the nomination. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 It’s a trying moment that his increasingly nervous top aides have been prepared to face for months, just not so soon. His campaign wasn’t expecting national news coverage after Hillary Clinton’s 6-point Nevada win to be quite so tough on him. Nor did staffers envision the brutal, 48-point beatdown in South Carolina — where Clinton won every county by double-digits and captured over 80 percent of black voters — and its stifling effect on the Vermont senator's attempts to regain momentum. 
 
 Their best-case Super Tuesday scenario looks like this: Of the 11 states holding Democratic contests, Sanders wins Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma -- four states where he’s invested in television advertising. Then he blows out Clinton in Vermont, and keeps it close in Virginia. As long as Clinton’s margins of victory in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas – states with sizable African-American populations — aren’t too overwhelming, he could march onto a trio of friendlier contests the following weekend with a credible case to make. His campaign could argue that Super Tuesday was a split decision, one that would still likely see him trailing Clinton in delegates, but not by an insurmountable margin, thanks to their proportional allocation. 
 
 With five states in hand, the bank-shot argument goes, Sanders would be able to claim widespread support from every region in the country, not just Southern, red states like Clinton. That divide, say Sanders staffers, should bolster his claim to the mantle of the party’s true ideological leader. Then, he should be able to reclaim his momentum with three straight wins in Nebraska, Kansas, and Maine — heavily white, and small, caucus states. 
 
 If Sanders threads that needle while Clinton romps through the South on Super Tuesday, he’ll lean hard on his argument against international trade deals to power his campaign in Michigan on March 8. That result, his aides believe, might power him into March 15, where it could help him over-perform in Ohio and Illinois. 
 
 “There were two ways to win the nomination,” said Sanders’ chief strategist Tad Devine, likening the contest to 1984’s hard-fought primary. “The very quick route of winning Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada and then taking a shot at South Carolina, which was always going to be hard, [or], when that option didn’t become desirable, we decided we’re going to take a different route that goes all the way through California." 
 
 It’s a longshot, particularly considering that polls in each of Sanders' March 1 target states are tight. But as long as Sanders' online fundraising juggernaut continues apace his candidacy is likely to keep rolling deep into March. And if Tuesday breaks his way, he believes, he could possibly last until July's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. 
 
 “We are trying to win every delegate that we can, and not only are we fighting for Super Tuesday, we’re looking ahead to California, the largest state of all, New York state, we think we’re going to do well in Michigan,” Sanders himself insisted on "Meet The Press" on Sunday, trying to break from the shadow of South Carolina by invoking states that vote in June, April and March, respectively. 
 
 But all those scenarios rely on Sanders winning a much greater portion of the African-American vote, a core component of the Democratic base and a huge portion of the Democratic electorate in the Southern states voting Tuesday. With just a few days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, there’s little reason to think Sanders will be able to dramatically improve on his performance, meaning Clinton is poised to blow him out across the South, drawing huge delegate margins. 
 
 “He spent a decent amount of time trying, in South Carolina, to win African-American voters, so it’s really an indication that he’s not going to do well with African-American voters anywhere else,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray of Saturday’s results. “All the polling is indicating that the rest of the South is probably going to look like South Carolina. The states where I see Sanders having any possibility of doing well are states where the Democratic primary electorate is at least 70 percent white, if not more." 
 
 Sanders’ top aides are more hopeful in public – as they see it, Clinton’s momentum from South Carolina could be short-lived due to the compressed calendar, and they think he will get a jolt of energy from the unexpected endorsement of Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a rising Democratic party star, on Sunday. 
 
 "The baseline for our performance with African American voters got set so low yesterday that we’re going to improve on it,” said Devine on Sunday, just days after top aides started grumbling about why the candidate was spending any time in South Carolina at all, when the state was clearly going to go to Clinton by a wide margin anyway. 
 
 Devine noted that Sanders’ campaign is likely to be well-funded enough to stick around for months longer in any case, dragging out the contest with a front-runner who will be reluctant to claim victory by relying on her popularity with super-delegates, instead wanting to claim the nomination with pledged delegates. 
 
 Those close to Sanders say he gets annoyed by questions about his plans to drop out if Tuesday doesn’t go as planned. Why would he, they ask, when there are only two candidates in the race and Clinton hasn’t yet reached 50 percent of the delegates? 
 
 When questioned on Wednesday about what he hoped to get out of the Democratic convention, for example, Sanders flashed some of his trademark annoyance with reporters — and at their assumption that he wouldn’t get there with a majority of delegates. 
 
 To him, the answer was obvious : “To nominate Bernie Sanders as president." 
 

– With Super Tuesday just a day away, these are the hurdles Bernie Sanders needs to clear to remain a viable candidate against Hillary Clinton: He's got to connect with minority voters. And quickly. The New York Times has Clinton—who killed Sanders by an 87-to-13 margin among black voters in South Carolina—poised for "a sweep of the South," as black voters make up the majority in key Super Tuesday states. And though Sanders' strategy seems to be to win states with a heavier white population, a Dem strategist tells USA Today Sanders can't give up the minority vote. "If you can't win non-whites in this party, you cannot win the nomination," he says. Among Sanders' biggest issues: Many black voters just don't know him, and the social media outreach his campaign has heavily leaned on isn't reaching older voters. Significant wins in at least five non-Southern states. Per Politico, Sanders needs these wins to "prove that Super Tuesday isn't his final stand." Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma, and his home state (all where he's invested in TV ads) are what he's banking on, plus a nail-biter in Virginia. He would still need Clinton to not win by a landslide in states with larger African-American populations to keep the delegate count within reach, though the Times notes he'd likely have to "win nonblack voters by one-third as much as Mrs. Clinton wins black voters" to stay in the game. If he pulls this off, that would give him the momentum to head into what FiveThirtyEight calls more the "favorable terrain" of Western states in late March—followed by the "big blue finale" of New York, Pennsylvania, and California. It all comes down to the delegates. An analyst for the "Cook Political Report" lends more dire-sounding specifics with the numbers, telling USA Today that Super Tuesday is "critical" for Sanders. "If Clinton were to match patterns of support she's received in primaries to date, she would win between 75 and 100 more delegates than Sanders on March 1," he explains. "That would mean that Sanders would need to win approximately 58% of the remaining pledged and undeclared superdelegates to tie Hillary Clinton by the end of the primaries. That's virtually impossible." Sanders' campaign is hoping to gain the lead in pledged delegates, as "the pressure on the superdelegates not to go against the will of the voters is going to be enormous," his senior media adviser says. How he could do that: capitalize on the caucus format like Obama did in 2008, the Times notes.