How a weakened Hillary Clinton fought her way back to the top

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David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

Here's one way to look at how the Nevada caucuses shape the future of the Democratic race: The onetime overwhelming frontrunner, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, barely defeated a fringe senator from a tiny state, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but, desperate to regain momentum in a dangerously close race, struggled to transform a victory of a mere 657 votes into a narrative suggesting she was back on top.

Here's another way to look at the implications of the Nevada caucuses for the Democratic presidential nomination: Mrs. Clinton's victory, no matter how small, still translated into a margin of 5.3 percentage points, big enough to avoid a second consecutive defeat and important enough to send her soaring into more congenial political territory, in South Carolina Saturday and on Super Tuesday (March 1) in 11 states, many in the Old Confederacy, where black voters and Democratic regulars will remove any doubt that she will be the nominee.

It turns out that both of these viewpoints are (mostly) right, that Mrs. Clinton's victory was a small-run thing; that despite capturing only 19 convention delegates to Mr. Sanders's 15, she has regained a modicum of momentum; and that her route to the Democratic nomination is a lot easier to envision than the one Mr. Sanders now must blaze. That is symbolized by the language the Vermonter now is employing, speaking of the prospects of a Sanders victory at the Philadelphia nominating convention in midsummer as "one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States."

Mrs. Clinton has yet to fashion a convincing win, and in fact there were worries in her camp that she might actually lose Nevada, a devastating development following Mr. Sanders's dominating triumph in New Hampshire. Instead, her twin slender wins in Iowa and Nevada, plus anticipated victories in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, would render New Hampshire an aberration -- a painful one, given the Clinton family's history in the Granite State, but not a defining one.

There is no question that as a candidate Mrs. Clinton has weaknesses. Her campaign style is forced, her negatives are high, her failure to close the deal worrisome to insiders who continue to struggle over whether she should emphasize her experience in a political atmosphere that favours outsiders, or her gender in a party that needs male votes if it is going to prevail in November, or her political lineage in an environment that just witnessed the unceremonious repudiation of another experienced, fluent member of a legacy family, former Republican Governor Jeb Bush of Florida.

But though she has weaknesses, including the passion gap between her followers and those of her rival, Mr. Sanders's weaknesses are more fundamental in modern Democratic politics. Mr. Sanders won only 22 per cent of the black vote in Nevada; that is a disturbing figure in a party that customarily wins around 90 per cent of the black vote. (Put aside the 96 per cent of that vote that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the first black nominee of a major political party, captured in 2008. Four years earlier, the white nominee of the Democratic Party, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, won 88 per cent of the black vote against President George W. Bush.)

Now take a look at the Super Tuesday states. Eight years ago, running against Mr. Obama for the 2008 nomination, Mrs. Clinton won five of those 11 states: Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee, plus tiny American Samoa. She actually won more convention delegates than Mr. Obama. Her prospects for 2016 include a potential sweep of the states she won in 2008, minus perhaps Massachusetts, where Mr. Sanders holds a 7-point lead and where the Democratic Party leans far more to the left than it does nationally; it was the only state Senator George McGovern of South Dakota captured in 1972 while losing the other 49 to President Richard M. Nixon. Mrs. Clinton's lead in each of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia is more than 20 points.

Plus this factor: Mrs. Clinton may have won only two state contests, and both of them by slender margins, but because party leaders (almost all of whom favour her) are seated as convention delegates, she has a commanding 502-70 lead over Mr. Sanders. That's a huge lead in the race to win the 2,383 required to win the nomination.

None of this is to minimize the effect that Mr. Sanders has had on the Democratic race. He has pushed Mrs. Clinton leftward, forced her to confront (and almost to repudiate) her comfortable relationship with Wall Street, prompted her to alter her language, and pressed her to address the wage and wealth gaps that are the principal policy elements of the Sanders campaign.

Young voters, an important party constituency that political scientists believed in 2008 would power the Democrats to victory for the remainder of the first quarter of the 21st century ardently favour Mr. Sanders, who won 82 per cent of voters younger than 30 -- and 67 per cent of those between 30 and 44. That is a strong performance for a candidate who is 74 years old, but then again Ronald Reagan won three-fifths of those 18 to 24 in his re-election campaign of 1984, when he was almost 74 himself.

So injured but not sidelined, struggling but not sinking, Mrs. Clinton has the inside track to the nomination. Her prospects in the general election? Far less clear. The RealClearPolitics average of polls taken this month show her with a 2.8 percentage advantage over billionaire Donald J. Trump, now the Republican frontrunner. That's well within the margin of error for a candidate who herself has been winning inside the margin of error.