Sanders Wins Nevada After All as Delegates Desert Clinton

After a small-margin loss in the Nevada Democratic caucus, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seems to have flipped his loss to a win against his opponent Hillary Clinton as part of state-level county conventions, the second stage of the caucus leading up to the party’s convention in June, local media reported Sunday.

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The final delegate count from all the county conventions across the state was 2,964 for Sanders and 2,386 for Clinton. Now the Sanders campaign will send 1,613 delegates and Clinton campaign will send 1,298 to the state convention in May.

This will be the third stage of allocating delegates representing the candidates in the Democratic Party convention in June.

Sanders' surprising win came as a result of Nevada’s most populous county convention, the Clark County.

“We pretty much won Nevada,” Joan Kato Sanders’ state director said, smiling as the results were announced according to the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

This is how the newspaper explained the rather complicated process of allocating delegates in Nevada:

“The county convention was the second in a three-step process for Nevada to choose its delegates to send to the Democratic National Convention this summer. The first was the February caucuses, the results of which are used to apportion 23 of the delegates Nevada will send to the national convention.

The second step, the county convention, is when delegates are selected to the state convention in May. The third step is the state convention, when 12 more delegates are apportioned based on attendees’ preferences.”

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In February, Hillary Clinton originally beat Bernie by a close margin in the Nevada caucuses, with 52.6 percent of the vote to Sanders’ 47.3 percent. In terms of delegates, she won 20 to his 15.

Now Sanders will have more delegates to send to the state convention as, according to reports, many of the delegates who supported Clinton did not show up to the convention Saturday while others, called unelected alternate delegates, flipped support to Sanders.

The Sanders campaign has won at least 15 states so far and is raising record funds strictly from individual donors. Sanders fundraising numbers are surpassing donations received by the Clinton campaign who has a super-PAC.

Sanders has been heavily campaigning in New York and Wisconsin where a victory for the self-proclaimed social democrat could increase his chances for winning the nomination.