Bernie Sanders’ prolific small-dollar fundraising means the Vermont senator can be a factor in the primary through the end of March – and perhaps for much longer. | AP Photo Why the Democratic primary is about to get racial There's a reason Bernie Sanders' first campaign stop after New Hampshire is with Al Sharpton. 
 
 CONCORD, N.H. — Hillary Clinton’s got until South Carolina to prove this is all a fluke. Bernie Sanders has until the end of March to prove it’s not. 
 
 If Sanders is truly going to become a Barack Obama-style Clinton-slayer of 2016, he knows he’s going to need to start racking up Obama-level support among non-white voters, and quickly, because the Democratic primary is about to come down to race. 
 
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 The Sanders campaign understands this, which is why the first campaign stop after his blowout victory in New Hampshire is a breakfast meeting Wednesday with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem’s iconic Sylvia’s restaurant. 
 
 Sanders, who represents the overwhelmingly white state of Vermont in the Senate, has yet to prove he has the ability to win minority voters -- a critical component of the Democratic Party coalition. He’s said he’s confident non-white voters would come to him once they heard his message -- and aides consistently repeat that claim – but his close defeat in Iowa and landslide win New Hampshire, two states that are just as white as Vermont, haven’t answered any of the questions. 
 
 The next two early states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, have much larger Latino and African American populations, which means he no longer has the luxury of appealing to his base of white liberals. 
 
 “He can’t get there from here. She can win with everything he’s got,” said Joe Trippi, who faced a similar problem when he was trying to figure out the math for the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, another Vermont liberal popular among white progressives, but one who didn’t have a primary opponent with the kind of strength among African-Americans and other minority voters that Clinton’s shown in 2008 and so far in this race. 
 
 “Once you leave New Hampshire, the Democratic Party is 44 percent non-white,” Trippi said. “What Iowa should have told everybody is that they’re probably going to dead heat each other among the 56 percent of white Democrats—and that’s probably being generous to him, because of all the conservative and moderate white Democrats elsewhere around the country.” 
 
 But if Sanders can make enough inroads by the Feb. 20 Nevada caucuses and then by the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary to come in a close second in those minority-heavy states, that’s when the Democrats who’ve dismissed the Vermont senator as a slight itch would start worrying the condition is becoming a full-on burn. 
 
 “With minority voters, African-Americans and Latinos, the main obstacle we have is they simply don’t know [Sanders]. As they get to know him, as they get to know his story, as they begin to see his message and what he stands for, I think he’s going to have a tremendous opportunity,” said chief strategist Tad Devine after Sanders’ victory Tuesday evening. “We also believe with African-Americans that Bernie Sanders’ story is enormously powerful. This is a guy who as a student at the University of Chicago set the direction of his entire life to the civil rights struggle and we think telling his story and what became of it, his fight for equality, civil rights, his fight against inequality and economic injustice is very, very powerful, and is going to resonate with the African-American community.” 
 
 Sanders has said that he plans to stick around until the convention, and new investments in television ads in Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma (all largely white states) on Tuesday sent a clear message that he has the money to fund that kind of prolonged challenge. 
 
 That still won’t be enough to take Clinton down: Sanders would need to almost run the table in the 10 caucus states that come in March and do respectably enough in the primary states, all while holding off a Clinton machine that’ll be pulling out all the stops. 
 
 Illinois State Sen. Terry Link, an assistant majority leader in Springfield and a Clinton delegate, said that he doesn’t expect there to be much of a race on his home turf on March 15. 
 
 “Sanders will obviously do very well in New Hampshire, but I think after that, where does he go?” Link said. “You see the handwriting on the wall.” 
 
 Sanders will also need to defuse the all-but-inevitable grenade that will be rolled into the fray by his rivals -- that Sanders is trying to beat an almost all-white path to the nomination through the notably not diverse Democratic electorates in caucus states like Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Maine, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, and Washington. 
 
 That caucus-based strategy is designed to soften the expected blow on Super Tuesday, when Clinton is expected to run well in Southern primaries. Sanders is betting on heavily white caucus states like Minnesota and Colorado that say, while banking on winning proportionally-allocated delegates in populous states like Virginia and Massachusetts. 
 
 From there, they hope a Clinton-is-stumbling-badly narrative will have taken hold, opening the door to upsets in primary states like Michigan. By late March, the Sanders campaign hopes, the senator will have amassed enough delegates—and momentum—to make clear he's in it for the long haul. 
 
 But Clinton, reading the New Hampshire tea leaves, turned her focus to South Carolina even before the polls closed in New Hampshire Tuesday night – she announced endorsements from six new state legislators there and turning the attention back to Sanders' gun control record and its potential resonance with African-Americans. 
 
 In a nod to the campaign’s new emphasis on the racial dimension of the primary fight, the Clinton camp also said new legislators in Mississippi – the state with the highest percentage of African-Americans in the nation – would back her on Wednesday based on "her commitment to fight for women, families and African Americans as President," and, to drive home the point, the campaign said three mothers of African American men killed in high-profile cases of violence, would campaign for her in the coming weeks. 
 
 Sanders’ prolific small-dollar fundraising means the Vermont senator can be a factor in the primary through the end of March – and perhaps for much longer. His campaign is expected to get a surge of donations with his win Tuesday and the party’s proportional allocation of delegates will allow him to keep on collecting delegates even in states where Clinton trounces him. 
 
 Michael Dukakis, who won New Hampshire in his 1988 Democratic race then went on to split primaries for weeks until he locked up the nomination with the New York primary in April, said that the number of wins Sanders racks up in the next few weeks are going to determine whether he looks like a competitive candidate or flips back to an alternative protest candidate, like Jesse Jackson became in his race. 
 
 “People want to be enthusiastic about things,” Dukakis said. “I suppose he could do what Jesse did in my case and say, ‘I’m going to keep running because I have ideas and opinions and I want to get them out there.’ But it’s tough to sustain momentum and it’s tough to sustain fundraising. The enthusiasm for that trails off.” 
 
 ||||| CBS News has announced criteria for Saturday's Republican primary debate that could keep one or more candidates off the stage. 
 
 Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are all guaranteed an invitation to the debate because they finished in the top three in the Iowa caucuses. 
 
 For the other candidates, it will require finishing in the top five in Tuesday night's New Hampshire primary, or in the top five in an average of national and South Carolina polls. Those polls must be approved by CBS News and released before noon on Feb. 12. 
 
 If the polls are to be trusted, both Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie are under threat of being excluded from the CBS debate. 
 
 Related: ABC's GOP debate: Best ratings of 2016 
 
 Fiorina, who was kept off the stage during Thursday night's ABC News debate, is polling seventh in New Hampshire, eighth in South Carolina and eighth nationally. Christie is polling sixth in New Hampshire, sixth in South Carolina and seventh nationally. 
 
 That could change after Tuesday night. Christie had a strong showing at the last debate, which may not be reflected in the polls. Meanwhile, Ben Carson is expected to perform poorly in New Hampshire and could see his support wane elsewhere. 
 
 And to be clear: There is no undercard debate. It's the mainstage or bust. 
 
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 The CBS News debate will take place in Greenville, S.C., on Saturday, one week before the state's primary. It will be moderated by "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson, along with CBS correspondent Major Garrett and Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel. ||||| Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke with supporters after his surprise second-place finish in the GOP New Hampshire primary. (Reuters) 
 
 Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke with supporters after his surprise second-place finish in the GOP New Hampshire primary. (Reuters) 
 
 John Kasich was “irrelevant” in Donald Trump’s assessment three months ago. After a second-place finish Tuesday, Kasich has a rejoinder: Not anymore. 
 
 For months, the Ohio governor was the un-Trump, trying to stay positive while quietly and methodically building a New Hampshire base the old-fashioned way — one town hall meeting at a time. 
 
 He skipped the Iowa caucuses, betting that his centrist, laid-back brand wouldn’t break through in that conservative bastion. Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, he sneaked up from behind the pack, designing a data-driven campaign to target Republicans and independents alike. 
 
 In the end, when voters here tuned in most intensely in the closing days, Kasich was in position to grab them. A quarter of the GOP electorate decided late, and Kasich performed strongly among them, according to network exit polls. 
 
 “There’s magic in the air with this campaign,” a jubilant Kasich said Tuesday night. 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush addressed supporters following the New Hampshire primary. (Reuters) 
 
 Kasich had maintained that he had “my own lane” in the GOP field, bristling at the suggestion that he should be lumped in with fellow establishment-friendly candidates, including the two others with gubernatorial experience, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, as well as Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.). 
 
 For now, his finish puts him on top of that pack. 
 
 But Kasich still placed far behind the front-runner Trump. And he faces a far greater challenge. He must compete in less-hospitable Southern territory before heading to his home ground of the Midwest. 
 
 And, after being mostly ignored by Trump and the rest of the field, he is bound to come under sustained assault from the competition, prompting a deeper examination of his record than occurred here, and testing his vow to remain “on the sunny side of the street.” 
 
 Nor did Kasich pull far enough ahead to shake off Bush and others competing to be the party’s Trump alternative. 
 
 Kasich had been the only candidate to explicitly vow to drop out if he performed poorly in New Hampshire. Now he and the other leading candidate plan to head to the next primary, in South Carolina on Feb. 20, and beyond. Christie, with a more disappointing finish in New Hampshire, is expected to decide Wednesday whether to continue. 
 
 Before Tuesday, the trio with gubernatorial experience had pitched their executive background and belittled the talka­thon role of the senators, Rubio and Cruz, all while Trump held a wide lead. 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie addressed supporters following the New Hampshire primary. (Reuters) 
 
 Bush, who entered the race with high expectations and was backed by a super PAC that had more than $100 million, was briefly in first place in the polls before plummeting, hurt both by voter wariness of extending a family dynasty and by an anti-establishment mood that helped Trump’s rise. Trump hammered at Bush’s proposal to provide a path to citizenship or legal status to 11 million illegal immigrants, and he lampooned Bush as “low-energy.” 
 
 Christie, while performing worse than he had hoped, played a vital role in the political dynamics of the race by taking on the attack role that Kasich eschewed. Christie savaged Rubio in Saturday’s debate for a robotic performance. That may have taken votes away from Rubio — some of which may have gone to Kasich. 
 
 Bush advisers also seized on Rubio’s performance, saying it proved their argument that the senator’s carefully crafted image masked inexperience and raised questions about whether he would be able to hold his own against a Democratic opponent. 
 
 Bush advisers dismissed the importance of Kasich’s showing here, arguing that Bush has the resources to run a national campaign while Kasich does not. 
 
 Bush’s South Carolina operation is led by Brett Doster, a longtime aide who was responsible for driving Bush across Florida during his failed 1994 gubernatorial campaign. In addition to the operation built by his team in the past seven months, they’ve recently inherited a political operation led by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), whose aides and donors have fallen into line with the Bush camp across the state. 
 
 Graham said in an interview Tuesday that Kasich will fade as the campaign moves south. 
 
 “Of the three early states, South Carolina has always been Jeb’s best, in terms of infrastructure and dynamics,” Graham said. “We have a reputation for voting for the most conservative candidate who’s electable. John’s a good guy, and a good governor, but when it comes to military issues, he’s been more of a budget-cutter than a hawk.” 
 
 That was a knock, with an eye on South Carolina as a ­pro-military state, at Kasich’s comments in September that the government should consider whether there is “excess infrastructure” being paid for in the military budget. 
 
 Kasich has spent months overshadowed by his rivals. He entered the race over the summer as Bush began his slide, telling voters here that, “frankly, I thought Jeb was just going to suck all the air out of the room, and it just hasn’t happened.” 
 
 He had won a hard-fought gubernatorial election in 2014, leaving him a battle-tested team that has transferred its skills to the presidential bid. 
 
 In New Hampshire, Kasich’s campaign strategy was months in the making — identifying potential supporters, cultivating them and turning them out. 
 
 “There’s a science to it, but a lot of it is just sweat and work — it’s calling people, it’s knocking on doors,” Kasich adviser Tom Rath said. “In many ways here you treat an independent voter like you treat a Republican — they’re a potential voter.” 
 
 As he campaigned here, Kasich unabashedly walked the middle of the road on two touchstone issues for conservatives— immigration and health care. 
 
 Kasich has aggressively rejected the feasibility of deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. 
 
 He has instead advocated strengthening border control while giving such immigrants a path to legalization so long as they meet certain conditions and pay back taxes. 
 
 Kasich’s greatest vulnerability in the Republican primaries relates to his decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio under provisions created by the Affordable Care Act. The governor has been lambasted by critics who accuse him of increasing the size of government in the state; Kasich instead says his decision was based on the premise that accepting the $13 billion offered by the federal government would serve the dual purposes of helping to balance the state’s budget while fulfilling a moral duty to its poorest citizens. Anticipating the battle ahead, Bush’s campaign on Sunday posted a Web-only ad that criticized Kasich’s decision to accept the money. 
 
 David Weigel and Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 COLUMBIA, S.C. — With Donald J. Trump’s decisive victory in New Hampshire and no strong runner-up among a pack of also-rans, the Republican race barreled into South Carolina on Wednesday shadowed by a question: whether any alternative candidate can gain enough support to threaten Mr. Trump’s drive to the nomination. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, the second-place finisher in New Hampshire with less than half the support of Mr. Trump, arrives in this more conservative Southern state where he has little staff or support. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, resuming an effort here to enlist the Christian right, the key to his victory in Iowa, faces a playing field where evangelical voters are far less monolithic. And former Gov. Jeb Bush, buoyed by outperforming his Florida rival Senator Marco Rubio, has a chance to open more daylight — but it is unclear if it will be enough to inspire establishment-leaning Republicans to coalesce behind him. 
 
 On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders’s idealistic message, which inspired a decisive victory in New Hampshire over Hillary Clinton, faces a sharp test in South Carolina, where Democrats are more moderate and demographically diverse. 
 
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 Mr. Trump is quite likely to face a kind of scrutiny here he has so far avoided: The only Republican candidate who does not favor increased military spending, he must woo a state with eight bases and 58,000 military retirees. His Vietnam War draft deferments may also be an issue. 
 
 While Mr. Trump has led in every poll in South Carolina since July, Mr. Bush has invested substantial resources here. His aides say 1,000 volunteers have knocked on doors at more than 50,000 homes. His brother, former President George W. Bush, who is expected to campaign alongside him here, appeared in an ad in South Carolina during the Super Bowl, declaring, “Jeb Bush is a leader who will keep our country safe.” 
 
 “The commander-in-chief question is going to be a big one,” said Jim Dyke, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush here. “If you look at exit polls from 2008 and 2012, in both elections about 25 percent identified as active military or had served in the military.” 
 
 Mr. Cruz, who won in Iowa in large part because of a superior ground game that activated evangelical voters, has replicated the formula in South Carolina. The Texas senator’s campaign says 9,800 volunteers are part of its grass-roots effort. It has “strike force” camps in Greenville for out-of-state troops and has enlisted 300 pastors in all 46 South Carolina counties. 
 
 But the evangelical vote in this state is less monolithic than in Iowa. 
 
 “There’s lots of diversity among evangelicals,” said Oren Smith, president of the socially conservative Palmetto Family Alliance, adding that his board includes supporters of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cruz, Mr. Rubio and the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. He said all four candidates are expected at a forum he is co-hosting on Friday at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in Greenville. 
 
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 Mr. Kasich’s campaign, already looking beyond South Carolina, issued a statement on Tuesday night that he was in position to win the Michigan primary on March 8 and continue a fight for the nomination in other Midwestern states. 
 
 After the voting in New Hampshire, the parties’ itineraries diverge over the next two and a half weeks. Democrats vote here on Feb. 27, one week after their Nevada caucuses. Republicans are taking a snowbird express from New Hampshire to South Carolina, where the primary is on Feb. 20. 
 
 The state’s primary has a history of dirty tricks by shadowy operatives. In 2000, a bogus telephone poll suggested John McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, and in 2007 voters received a Christmas card suggesting Mitt Romney, a Mormon, supported polygamy. The Post and Courier of Charleston has even introduced a web app for readers to report campaign shenanigans. 
 
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 Even though Democrats here vote later, that doesn’t mean the candidates will be scarce in the coming days, in person or on the airwaves: Hillary Clinton will campaign here on Friday, and she has a new ad aimed at African-American voters that decries the criminal justice system. Mr. Sanders has legions of volunteers in the state. 
 
 Mr. Trump was endorsed by South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, at a rally last month in tiny Gilbert, where the billionaire developer’s ability to draw 1,000 people was another sign of his appeal. A convincing victory for him here could coax other establishment Republicans to his side. 
 
 On the Democratic side, after Mrs. Clinton’s struggles in two states whose contests were dominated by liberal, overwhelmingly white voters, South Carolina will test the theory that the South is her firewall. More than half the state’s Democratic primary electorate is African-American. Mrs. Clinton, who promises to build on President Obama’s record, has a commanding lead here in polls. 
 
 “The party starts to look more like the Democratic Party nationally when you leave Iowa and New Hampshire,” said Bakari Sellers, a former state representative who supports Mrs. Clinton. He said black voters would embrace her as a practical fighter for issues they care about, rather than rallying to Mr. Sanders’s idealism. 
 
 “What’s going to drive her through the South are African-American women,” he said of Mrs. Clinton. “My mom and her friends are going to win this election.” 
 
 Mr. Sanders, who held a rally last year in Rock Hill, S.C., that attracted 3,000 people, is trying to make inroads with minority voters. State Representative Justin T. Bamberg, an African American who originally endorsed Mrs. Clinton, switched his support to Mr. Sanders last month, calling him “bold” and Mrs. Clinton the “status quo.”
– Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump won big in New Hampshire on Tuesday, putting their parties in uncharted territory, which the GOP establishment in particular could find tricky to navigate. Here's what analysts expect to see in the days leading up to the Nevada caucuses—which are on Feb. 20 for Democrats and Feb. 23 for Republicans—and the South Carolina primary, which happens on Feb. 20 for Republicans and Feb. 27 for Democrats. Race will become a big issue for the Democrats. Outside Iowa and New Hampshire, "the Democratic Party is 44% non-white," and Sanders has yet to show that he can take those votes away from Hillary Clinton, analyst Joe Trippi tells Politico. But the senator from Vermont is trying: His first campaign stop on Wednesday is breakfast with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem. The GOP "establishment lane" will remain crowded. Even if Chris Christie's "hard thinking" leads to him dropping out, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich are expected to keep jostling for the votes of Republicans turned off by Trump and Ted Cruz. Jeb Bush, who came close to a third-place finish in New Hampshire, told supporters Tuesday night that they had "reset things," the Hill reports. Trump will have to answer questions on the military. With eight military bases in South Carolina, military issues are big, meaning Trump can expect rivals to target his opposition to increasing military spending and his Vietnam-era draft deferments, the New York Times reports. "The commander-in-chief question is going to be a big one," senior Bush adviser Jim Dyke says. "If you look at exit polls from 2008 and 2012, in both elections about 25% identified as active military or had served in the military." John Kasich will come under attack. The Ohio governor, who said he would drop out if he performed poorly in New Hampshire, is now a target because of his second-place finish, which could test his resolve to keep his campaign positive, predicts the Washington Post. His rivals are expected to lay into his moderate positions on immigration and health care. There will be some GOP last stands. South Carolina is expected to finish off a few campaigns, probably including that of Carly Fiorina, who won't qualify for Saturday's Republican debate, CNN reports. Ben Carson campaign director Bob Dees, however, says there is zero chance of his guy dropping out in the weeks to come, reports the Guardian, which notes that Carson's support has nosedived amid concerns over his foreign policy knowledge and "latterly, availability of laundered clothing and ability to successfully walk on to a stage."