New Democrat contenders on a roll into Nevada

Rising Democrat contenders Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are pouring money and staff into upcoming primary races.

Amy Klobuchar in Concord, New Hampshire, this week. Pictures: Reuters

Rising Democrat presidential contenders Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are urgently pouring money and staff into coming primary­ races in Nevada and South Carolina to capitalise on the momentum of their strong showing in New Hampshire.

The next primaries are likely to reveal whether either 38-year -old former mayor Mr Buttigieg or 59-year-old Senator Klobuchar from Minnesota have enough national support to seriously challenge frontrunner Bernie Sanders, who narrowly won this week’s primary in New Hampshire.

Only hours after his strong showing in New Hampshire, where he won 24.4 per cent of the vote to Senator Sanders’s 25.7 per cent, Mr Buttigieg announced he would double his staff in Nevada and boost the number of campaign workers in South Carolina to 55.

Senator Klobuchar, who leapfrogged Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren to finish third in New Hampshire with 19.8 per cent of the vote, has experienced a surge of more than $4m in new donations over the past week and has hired new staff and launched new ads in Nevada, where she will campaign this week.

Mr Buttigieg and Senator Klo­buchar are trying to connect better with African-American and Latino voters in Nevada and South Caro­lina who have not shown the same enthusiasm about their candidacy as the predominantly white voters of the first two voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr Buttigieg, who came vir­tually level with Senator Sanders in the first Iowa caucus last week, said he would campaign in Nevada against the 78-year-old Vermont senator on the issue of healthcare.

Mr Buttigieg supports a policy of “Medicare for all who want it”, in which people could choose to keep their private health insurance, while Senator Sanders would abolish private insurance in his sweeping Medicare-for-all proposal.

“They (Nevada workers) are not interested in Senator ­Sanders’s vision of eliminating all private plans,” Mr Buttigieg said on Thursday. “I think that is a very good debate for us to have.”

Polls in Nevada, which votes on February 22, have yet to reflect the New Hampshire result. They show Mr Biden leading on 21 per cent support, with Senator Sanders on 17.5 per cent, Senator Warren on 11.5 per cent and Mr Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar on 7 per cent and 3 per cent respectively.

The Biden campaign team insisted on Thursday that the former vice-president was still in the race, despite a disappointing fifth place in New Hampshire with 8.4 per cent of the vote, after a fourth place in Iowa the week before.

Biden campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond claimed that the coming primary contests in states with large minority populations would deliver very different results.

“I wouldn’t trade positions with anybody else in the race,” Mr Richmond said. “Let’s imagine if the states were in the reverse order. This whole conversation would be different. So I don’t believe that the momentum here relates and carries forward, because we’re in different states, different demographics.”

Mr Richmond also warned that the Democratic Party would risk “down-ballot carnage” if it chose Senator Sanders, a democratic socialist, as the party’s nominee to challenge Donald Trump.

“If Bernie Sanders was at the top of the ticket, we would be in jeopardy of losing the house,” Mr Richmond said. “We would not get the Senate back.”

The New Hampshire poll has triggered a shakeout of the large Democratic field with former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick pulling out of the race on Thursday after getting only a handful of votes. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and senator Mich­ael Bennet also pulled out of the race this week after poor showings.

There are now eight Democrats left in the race.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, Troy Price, has resigned following the fallout from the botched caucus votein that state last week that led to no results being released on one of the most important nights of the US election calendar.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia