It’s all over but the shouting

It's caucus time.

Finally.

On Saturday, Nevada's Democrats will gather to debate the merits of their two remaining candidates and try to persuade each other that either former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is the best choice to lead America.

If polls are to be believed — and that's a highly questionable prospect in an event where people can show up, register and participate in the caucus, all on the same day — Clinton has a slight lead. But the intensity of efforts in the final weeks shows how close this race has become, and how far the Sanders campaign has come in challenging one of the best-organized machines American politics has ever seen.

The caucus system rewards the campaign with the best organization, and the Clinton campaign still believes it benefits as minority turnout rises.

"We feel like we've built an organization that will be successful here, so we're looking forward to a victory here," said John Podesta, Clinton's national campaign chairman. "We've been here early, we've organized in every community across this state, in the Latino community, in the Asian-American/Pacific Islander community here, we've reached out across the state in rural areas as well as in Clark County, so we feel like we've built a very strong organization."

That's especially true in the Latino community, where the Clinton campaign moved to consolidate the vote in the final week. On Thursday, several high profile Latino leaders not only endorsed Clinton, but accused Sanders of being on the wrong side of their issues.

"He was absent in the most critical immigration debates," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who criticized Sanders for voting against the 2007 immigration reform bill, for supporting an amendment that he said criminalized helping illegal immigrants and for defending his actions on the CNN program of Lou Dobbs.

"At the moment we needed somebody to stand up, Sanders was playing for the wrong team," Gutierrez said. "Being with us today doesn't make up for years of absence."

Activist Delores Huerta agreed: "There is just no comparison. No comparison," she said. "He [Sanders] really set us back, you might say, a decade by not supporting the immigration bill in 2007."

But Caesar Vargas, national Latino outreach strategist for Sanders' campaign, says there are good reasons Sanders voted against that 2007 bill, not least of which was the prospect of large corporations importing guest workers without adequate protections against abuse. Vargas said he could have been granted citizenship under that bill, but opposed it anyway as too high a price.

"I couldn't have accepted citizenship knowing that big, multi-national corporations would be allowed to bring more guest workers to the country in slave-like conditions," Vargas said.

Moreover, he clarified that Sanders doesn't believe immigration depresses wages for American workers; instead, he said, lack of workplace protection for workers in general hurt all workers, immigrant and native-born alike. To be sure, Sanders' minimum wage proposal is $15 per hour, higher than Clinton's $12-per-hour plan.

He said the Latino community isn't swayed by high-profile surrogate endorsements, even from names they've known for years in immigration fights. And Vargas predicted that Latinos, especially young people who have hope of attending college under Sanders' plan, could help turn the tide in Nevada for his campaign. "The [Clinton] firewall is nonexistent, and if they think it exists, it's coming down," he said.

By Sunday morning, we should know if he's right, when months of organizing, door-knocking, phone-calling, networking and advertising by both campaigns is tested in only the second competitive caucus Nevada has ever seen. Much like 2008, the fight will be hard and the results will be close.

— Steve Sebelius is a Las Vegas Review-Journal political columnist and co-host of the show "PoliticsNOW," airing at 5:30 p.m. Sundays on 8NewsNow. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.