Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses by a wide margin on Saturday, as TAC editor Jim Antle said in his recent post:

It’s starting to dawn on people—not least of all Democrats running for president—that Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic presidential nomination. The longtime independent socialist senator from Vermont rolled up yet another early state win, this time a landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses. And he may have solved the problem that doomed his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Sanders is cobbling together a multiracial coalition. Entrance polls showed him winning 54 percent of Hispanics, trouncing Joe Biden who came in a distant second with 16 percent. (He did carry this demographic against Clinton in Nevada four years ago.) He finished second among African-American caucus-goers, though Biden won a plurality. Sanders took 65 percent of voters between the ages of 17 and 29, though he didn’t lose among any age group except the 65 and up crowd. “In Nevada, we have just put together a multi-generational, multi-racial coalition which is going to not only win in Nevada, it’s going to sweep this country,” Sanders crowed to supporters.

Sanders’ big Nevada win is a testament to his campaign’s efforts to organize and turn out voters, especially those voters that have usually not participated in the process. His campaign has made a concerted effort to reach and mobilize Latino voters, and virtually none of his competitors has done the same. The New York Times reports:

The strong showing in the first-in-the-West caucus state seemed to be a payoff for Mr. Sanders’s unique political philosophy and his campaign team’s electoral strategy, which bet big on grass-roots outreach to Latinos and immigrant populations. It’s a model the campaign is looking to take across the country, working to reach people across racial and ethnic groups who have traditionally been less likely to vote.

That effort paid huge dividends on Saturday when Sanders reportedly received more than half of the Latino vote in Nevada. The senator from Vermont has done what no other major party candidate has done by winning the popular vote in the first three consecutive states, and he seems well-positioned to continue his winning streak. The reaction from many “centrist” Democrats to this development has been a mixture of horror and loathing, but this is just a measure of how little these people seem to understand the voters in their own party. One poll after another finds that Sanders is the best-liked candidate in the field with favorability numbers over 70% among Democrats, but the professional pundits and campaign flacks keep pretending that Sanders is wildly out of step with the party and doesn’t represent it. They are just proving that they are the ones out of touch with the people they claim to speak for. The reality is also slowly dawning on these people that they are describing a Democratic Party that hasn’t existed in 15 or 20 years.