Rep. Joe Salazar strolled head held high into the Colorado House chamber Wednesday morning, jacket over his shoulder, trademark bolo tie swinging in time to his steps. Salazar, D-Thornton, is perhaps the most visible Bernie Sanders champion in the Capitol and it was the morning after Hillary Clinton had walloped Sanders in what at press time looks like a five-states to-zero Democratic Party primary rout.

“Hey, we knew this was coming,” Salazar said. “Today (Sanders) is in Arizona — the race is going now to western states that are less friendly to the Clintons.” Salazar pressed his lips together, nodding. He sounded like one of the candidate’s closest advisers.

Clinton bested Sanders in delegate-rich Florida, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri. According to campaign statistics site FiveThirtyEight, Sanders now has to win just under 60 percent of the remaining 2,000 or so elected delegates to defeat Clinton, which means he’ll have to beat her by around 16 points through the rest of the election.

It seems a lifetime away from the real Super Tuesday, March 1, when Sanders won four states, including Colorado, where his supporters overran the caucuses and delivered Sanders a 19-point win.

Many of those Bernie supporters in Colorado were Latino, a surprise phenomenon that Salazar almost alone expected. He is the only Democratic Latino political figure of many in the state to endorse Sanders over Clinton. And he was riding high.

“I had been out in the community, speaking up and down the state, and I had a good feeling that Bernie was going to take Colorado and take the Latino vote,” Salazar told The Statesman in his office decorated with Latino and Native American art work and furnishings. “We’re concerned about immigration issues but we’re also concerned with economic issues, so the things Sanders is talking about really resonate with our community. In Colorado economics, the Latino community and the African-American Community, we’re the miner’s canary — when bad things happen, we’re the first to get smacked by it. We know there are people getting rich off of us. Sanders is talking about economic equality and economic racism — and that resonates quite well.”

Salazar said fellow lawmakers were giving him endless grief in the days before the caucus for supporting Sanders.

“I had a bunch of House members just giving me all sorts of crap about Bernie, a rough time, but I heard that on Tuesday night, when Bernie had wiped out Hillary in the state, that some of the electeds here had a conference call — not to talk about Hillary’s loss, but to talk about how they were going to deal with me on the House floor.

“When I came in Wednesday, some of them were lined up in a row, they were bowing, doing a mea culpa, paying respect.” Salazar burst out laughing, reaching his arms out flat over his desk, doing the bowing motion.

In the aftermath of Hillary’s rout this week, the Sanders team reportedly huddled to talk strategy in Sedona — the glowing Sonoran Desert town in Arizona that has launched countless previous mystic journeys.

The Sanders plan, according to reports, is to win the heavily white western states, do well in New York and California and then persuade super delegates to defect from the Hillary camp.

“With more than half the delegates yet to be chosen and a calendar that favors us in the weeks and months to come, we remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination,” Sanders said in a statement.

— john@coloradostatesman.com