Nevada County Conventions Win Likely to Net Two More Delegates for Sanders

Six weeks after he lost the Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders has likely narrowed Hillary Clinton's delegate lead in that state after winning Saturday's county-level Democratic conventions.

The Las Vegas Sun explains:

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.

According to the Associated Press, the conventions held throughout Nevada yielded 2,124 Sanders-supporting delegates who will head to the state convention on May 14, accounting for 55 percent of the total delegates. Hillary Clinton earned 1,722 delegates, or 45 percent of the total.

"This means we won Nevada," Sanders' Nevada state director Joan Kato said.

Veteran Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston wrote on his blog that Sanders "probably flipped two delegates from Hillary Clinton's camp," narrowing her lead from 20-15 to 18-17.

And Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told the Washington Post "his team believes Sanders has at least narrowed the gap to a single delegate--and he raised the possibility that his candidate could actually come out of Nevada with more delegates than Clinton when all is said and done."

There were complaints about the process on both sides.

Heavy notes: "This isn't the first time in the presidential campaign that a caucus or primary win was changed in the convention. On the GOP side, Donald Trump won Louisiana with the popular vote on primary day. But Ted Cruz ended up with more delegates at the state convention."