On the Ground in Colorado: Sanders Supporters Unfazed by Super Tuesday Losses

Any casual observer who happened to stroll into the Bernie Sanders watch party at Denver Colorado's Bluebird Theater on Tuesday night would not have guessed from the festive atmosphere that the candidate was at that moment losing disastrously to his rival in the scramble for Super Tuesday states.

Colorado's caucuses, which drew a record voter turnout on the Democratic side, ended less than an hour before supporters began filing into the theater Tuesday night. On the biggest day of the 2016 election so far, 12 states and one territory voted for their favored presidential candidates on the same day.

Inside Sanders' Super Tuesday party, the crowd chugged beers, danced, and munched pizza as they watched results from across the country pop up on CNN, which was being projected on a giant screen above the stage. At around 9pm local time, a loud cheer rose as Bernie was declared the winner in Colorado. Final results showed he beat Hillary Clinton by nearly 20 points in the battleground state, but she claimed victory overall on Super Tuesday, taking seven states, including delegate-rich Texas, to Sanders' four.

Yet, supporters that night did not appear concerned as the results rolled in and the prospect of a Sanders nomination slipped further from their grasp. Instead, when Sanders eventually came on to give his speech from Vermont — which the senator scooped up easily, along with Colorado, Oklahoma, and Minnesota on Tuesday — the masses roared and burst into chants of "Bernie, Bernie!" Even Sanders's director of Latino Outreach, Cesar Vargas continued to grin and greet staffers with hugs throughout the evening.

In his speech, Sanders said that the point of his campaign was not to only win the presidency, but to change the conversation and upend establishment politics — a point he first began making after a contest-turning 50-point loss to Clinton in South Carolina earlier this month.

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"This campaign, as I think all of you know, is not just about electing the president," Sanders said. "It is about transforming America."

The atmosphere Tuesday night was reminiscent of recent Sanders rallies in Colorado, where people in the tens of thousands had turned up to support the senator. At those events, as venues reached capacity, many were relegated to overflow areas outside the convention centers and arenas. The campaign targeted Colorado heavily in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, and the results from the state showed the campaign's strategies and spending — Sanders spent more than double the amount Clinton did on television ads in the state — had clearly hit the mark.

At one rally this weekend at Colorado State University, thousands of young voters showed up to hear Sanders speak. "Nothing here is a must-win," Sanders said at the event. "We have dozens and dozens of states we have to compete in. But Colorado is very, very important to us."

His campaign argues that Tuesday's results showed this his message is also beginning to resonant with Latinos and Hispanics (which make up roughly 21 percent of Colorado's population) as Sanders' campaign has struggled to broaden its appeal to non-white voters. Colorado did not conduct exit polls in its caucuses, leaving the campaign without solid data to back up its claim, but Sanders' team has argued that they won 10 of the top 15 largest Hispanic counties in the state and could not have won Colorado without strong Latino support.

After the Nevada caucuses, the campaign rapidly shifted resources, including a number of its Latino outreach staffers, from the Silver State to beef up its ground game in Colorado.

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"Our strategy and our exponential growth came in at the last moment," the campaign's state director, Dulce Saenz, told VICE News. "The last two days before the caucus, the energy that was here in the office was so palpable."

The campaign now hopes Latino communities will continue to rally around the senator in the contests ahead.

"Latinos will play a pivotal role in Sen. Sanders' path to victory in important states like Arizona, Illinois, New York, California and Florida," Arturo Carmona, Sanders' deputy political director said in a statement Wednesday.

The energy and enthusiasm that followed the senator's rallies across Colorado was seen at precinct caucus sites Tuesday night, where unexpectedly high voter turnouts threw organizers and operations off kilter.

At North High School in Denver, a caucus site where residents for at least four precincts turned up to vote, lines of people snaked out the door and through the parking lot right up until voting began at 7pm. Later, as precincts broke off into smaller groups, residents of two separate precincts were forced to vote together in their separate caucuses at the same time in the school's library. For more than 30 minutes, precinct chairs and speakers for the candidates yelled over each other on opposite sides of the room. Others at different precinct caucus sites across the state reported similar chaos, including one caucus in North Boulder that simply couldn't accommodate the huge crowds that turned up to vote Tuesday.

An eleventh-hour flock of voter registration changes prior to the cut-off date also caused a last minute headache for the state Democratic Party and the elections division. Currently, the largest party in Colorado is "unaffiliated," so residents wanting to caucus for Sanders or Clinton or any of the Republican candidates were forced to change their party affiliation online before January 4. But a late rush of residents wanting to meet the deadline caused a huge error on the registration website, which is managed by Colorado's secretary of state, an employee of the Denver Elections Division told VICE News.

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The Denver Elections Division and office of the Colorado Secretary of State were not immediately available for comment Wednesday.

Despite the confusion on caucus night, many Sanders supporters — mostly in their 20s and 30s — on Tuesday night expressed hope that momentum in Colorado will continue to grow in the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention. Sanders, who raised a record more than $42 million in February alone from small contributions, has said he has no plans to drop out of the race.

Yet the campaign faces an uphill battle. Clinton's seven-state victory on Super Tuesday gives her a significant delegate lead after the Super Tuesday contests, one that Sanders will have difficulty overcoming. His campaign staff told reporters on Wednesday morning that they see a path forward through which Sanders could still clinch the nomination, but the momentum is clearly in Clinton's favor at the moment.

Sanders has pointed repeatedly to national polling showing that he is better positioned to take on the Republican nominee in November. Polls in February showed him defeating Trump by a greater margin the Clinton and also showed him out-polling Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, while Clinton often lost to those candidates.

Still, a Keating Research/OnSight Public Affairs poll of Colorado voters released Wednesday morning showed that Clinton would defeat Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by 10 percentage points. The poll, released after Super Tuesday, did not even test Sanders against Trump.

"Younger Colorado voters may be 'feeling the Bern' now, but they're clearly ready for Hillary in November," pollster Chris Keating told the Denver Business Journal. "In comparison, Trump has only lukewarm support (74 percent) among Colorado Republicans and is nowhere close to where he needs to be among other demographics."

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Heather Laurie, a Clinton supporter who was handing out stickers that read "I'm with her" to caucus goers at North High School Tuesday night, said that she was surprised by the number of Sanders supporters who had turned out at the site. But Laurie said regardless of what happened in Colorado on Super Tuesday, that she was confident her candidate would ultimately win the nomination.

"I can't stand the thought of having another old white man in office," she said. "He may be revolutionary, but he's just not realistic. Hillary is the only one who can beat Trump. I hope all these young people realize that and vote for her when the time comes."

"I'm not shocked by the results," Audrey Kline, a member of the Colorado Young Democrats who ran a precinct in the Denver area told VICE News. "… But I also have a feeling that the Hillary campaign was looking farther down the road. In my opinion, Colorado might have been a calculated loss."

"And even though I am a Hillary Clinton supporter," Kline continued, "I do think it's significant that Sanders won in Colorado, because it shows that organized and early work in the caucus states can be effective. The high number of voters that came out in my neighborhood alone, it was just incredible and unprecedented."

Kline said that at her precinct, even though everybody was divided between Clinton and Bernie, she noticed they were united in their ultimate goals.

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"We even made a rule last night that no one was allowed to say the name 'Donald Trump,'" she laughed. "It was a small reminder that, for Democrats, no matter which team you're on, we all share the ideas of equality and fairness. And the values we all have are not the same one's that Trump has, at all."

Yet some Sanders supporters Tuesday said they favored even Trump over Clinton, whom they described as "the essence of establishment." One Sanders supporter who attended the senator's victory party in Colorado Tuesday night, Kevin Amsberry, told VICE News if Sanders did not win the nomination, he and his friends would be voting for the Republican frontrunner. Another supporter, Ethan Lesley, said he "wouldn't go that far."

"I might not like Clinton, but we can't let that racist hate-monger become president," he said.

Follow Liz Fields and Rachel Browne on Twitter: @lianzifields, @rp_browne.

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