LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders is becoming harder to stop.

Nevada is where his

opponents are starting to realize it.

Advisers to three rival campaigns privately conceded over the weekend that the best
anyone else could hope for here is second or third. Some of them gape at the crowd sizes
at Sanders' events — like the swarm of supporters who accompanied Sanders, his fist
raised, to an early caucus site in Las Vegas on Saturday, the first day of early voting in
the state.

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While few expect that Sanders can carry more than a third of the vote in Nevada, nearly
everyone believes that will be enough to win in a field where the moderate vote remains
splintered. It is becoming a source of celebration for Sanders' supporters and an urgent
problem for those who want to prevent him from claiming the nomination.

“He’s going to win with 28 percent of the vote. We’re not talking about him getting 50
percent of the vote,” said Andres Ramirez, a Nevada-based Democratic strategist and
former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus. “But
the rest of the field is so fragmented, and he has his base locked, that he can continue
winning just by holding onto his base.”

There are signs the field may become even more fragmented in Nevada this week.
"The rest of the field is so fragmented, and he has his base locked, that he can
continue winning just by holding onto his base.”

- Andres Ramirez, a Nevada-based Democratic strategist

Pete Buttigieg, who topped the field with Sanders in Iowa and finished less than 2
percentage points behind him in New Hampshire, is not polling well in Nevada or in the
next voting state, South Carolina. Amy Klobuchar surged in New Hampshire but is
starting from behind in Nevada. Biden is the opposite — humiliated in Iowa and New
Hampshire but with better prospects here.

An aide to one of Sanders' opponents described the new "default state of the race" as one
featuring Sanders in his own orbit and everyone else in theirs.

The carousel of rising and falling centrists is pushing Sanders ahead. Each of his
competitors is now scrambling to emerge as the one credible alternative to him — and to
do so convincingly before Super Tuesday, when the free-spending billionaire Michael
Bloomberg begins to assert himself in that same centrist lane.

It may be too late. In Nevada this weekend — the first state with a sizable Latino vote —
Democratic activists were still murmuring about the inability of Klobuchar and Tom
Steyer to name Mexico’s president during interviews with Telemundo late last week.
Polling suggests Buttigieg and Klobuchar are not exciting broad swaths of voters in
Nevada and South Carolina. Warren finished a distant fourth in New Hampshire.
Hoarse when she addressed a Clark County Democratic Party gala at the Tropicana on
Saturday night, she said she’d caught a cold.