Newsletter: Essential Politics: Going for broke in Nevada

Saturday’s Nevada Democratic caucuses provide an unusual experience for campaign reporters -- a contest where we have no clue about the outcome.

In most races, polls provide at least a rough gauge of where the candidates stand. They’re not always completely reliable, but their track record is a lot better than many people think.

Except in Nevada.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington Bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in the presidential campaign and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

For a host of reasons, which Mark Z. Barabak expertly explained, Nevada has a history of unreliable polling. And the problems of predicting a caucus, in which turnout is extremely low and voter history negligible, make all the polling uncertainties worse.

You can following along Saturday as we post live results, speeches and analysis from both Nevada and South Carolina on Trail Guide.

What’s indisputably true is that the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns have treated the race as a close contest with extremely high stakes, as Barabak explained in his analysis of the race.

If Sanders can win in Nevada, he will puncture the Clinton campaign’s confidence that her standing among minority voters will trump his appeal to white liberals. Conversely, a solid Clinton win would quiet the growing anxiety many of her supporters have felt since the pasting she took in New Hampshire.

The need to settle those fears has grown more urgent, because of a problem Clinton never anticipated: Her campaign can’t raise enough money. Read Evan Halper’s explanation of the depth of the money problem and what Clinton is trying to do about it.

The problem, though, as Cathy Decker diagnoses, is that Clinton is out-of-phase with the times. She’s a policy expert at a time voters want raw passion, an establishment figure in a year for outsiders. She may well stabilize her campaign this week, but even if she does, this will be a difficult year.

On the other side of the race, the Republican contest in South Carolina appears more predictable: Anything short of a win by Donald Trump with about 30% of the vote would constitute a major upset. The big question, as Noah Bierman explains in his summary of the South Carolina race, is who comes in second -- Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida?

Rubio got a boost this week when Gov. Nikki Haley endorsed him. But some polls already indicate that bump has started to fade, as they often do. Trump’s ability to dominate the news through his long-distance fight with Pope Francis may have hastened that fade.

Think Trump will suffer from the quarrel with the pontiff? Maybe some day, but not now.

“Tell the pope to take a hike,” one Trump supporter in South Carolina told Bierman. The safe bet is that Trump’s supporters will stay with him.

For more on the solidity of Trump’s support, check out this story by Bierman and Lisa Mascaro, which features a quote that has become an instant classic:

“We’re voting with our middle finger,” John Baldwin, a used-car dealer, told us.

The last six polls in the state show Jeb Bush trailing. A bad showing on Saturday could be the end for his campaign. If you had bet on that outcome nine months ago, when the campaign got underway, you could have won quite a sum.

While we wait for the results, here are a few other excellent stories worth a read:

Sanders often denounces outside groups that try to influence elections. But he has several that back him, most notably the nurses union, as Kate Linthicum describes.

Linthicum also took a detailed look at the generational split among Latino voters, with older voters backing Clinton and younger ones increasingly siding with Sanders. How far that split goes could determine Saturday’s outcome in Nevada and influence several other contests down the line.

Finally, few states were hit as hard by the Great Recession as Nevada was. As Chris Megerian reports, the recession’s effects continue to shape the way voters in the state view their choices.

That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in the 2016 campaign with our Trail Guide, at our politics page and on Twitter at @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.