Hairy is probably on the pessimistic side, but at the same time it doesn’t look great. Ralston made a comment yesterday that the way the numbers look now, Dems need to win Independents by 5 points. Biden won them by 6 points in 2020. It’s also been commented on here that due to change in registration procedures, more younger / new voters will be registered as Independent than in previous years, which implies that winning them by at least 5 is certainly possible.
Essentially, it looks pretty much like what was expected. NV is a toss up.
No, because of exactly what Skaje said. Plus Clark is slower at going through absentee ballots than the Cow Counties. And, like we've discussed before, the undeclared voters skew young thanks to the way AVR works in NV, and therefore will go to Harris.
I'm expecting pretty much a repeat of 2020 in Nevada.
The only time I can say things definitively looked hairy in Nevada was leading up to 2014 when it became clear Dem turnout in Clark was going to be like half of what it was in 2010 (also a very bad election!) In all the elections after, with most statewide races in single digits, I've never had the sense that early vote analysis (even from the vaunted Jon Ralston) could conclusively tell us who was going to end up on the right side of a low to mid single digit win. The early vote stats in Nevada look just as "bad" as they do in Colorado this year and I don't think anyone expects Trump to gain ground in the latter when election results and trends in recent years are horrendous for the CO GOP. Republicans are voting earlier, Democrats are voting later, I just don't know what conclusions can be drawn from that besides "2020 was weird". I say this not with confidence/optimism (Democrats might not show up on election day and we do badly), but also not with pessimism (Dems very well might show up in force and also we get a good split with independents and swing voters). Ask me in 8 days for better analysis! ;)
My read on Nevada is that Trump is probably up about 1 in the votes already banked *if* indies break 57-43 Dem and partisans break 95-5. Those are the imputed numbers from the 2022 Senate race when Masto outran the party split by 36k votes. That was a big change from 2020 when Biden ran 6k votes behind the party split. The number of indies in NV has absolutely exploded since 2020 as 'indie' is now the default for people who automatically register. Dems probably have some ground to make up, but it really depends on the indie split and/or crossover voting.
About those 95-5 partisan splits I think its very possible, in fact I might even say its likely, that there's still some residual anti-EV bias among Republicans and also that whatever tiny percentage of pro-Harris Republicans exist that they are more likely than the median Republican to vote early.
I don't put a lot of weight on either the partisan split or the indie split in isolation, because there's no way to disentangle them. If you have a more favorable partisan split you can get away with a less favorable indie split, etc.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me if you're right that registered Rs crossing over to vote Harris would be more likely than other Rs to vote early, at least by mail. Rs seemed ok with voting early in person even in 2020.
Agreed for the most part, but wouldn't you say at this point that things are looking pretty hairy in Nevada?
Hairy is probably on the pessimistic side, but at the same time it doesn’t look great. Ralston made a comment yesterday that the way the numbers look now, Dems need to win Independents by 5 points. Biden won them by 6 points in 2020. It’s also been commented on here that due to change in registration procedures, more younger / new voters will be registered as Independent than in previous years, which implies that winning them by at least 5 is certainly possible.
Essentially, it looks pretty much like what was expected. NV is a toss up.
No, because of exactly what Skaje said. Plus Clark is slower at going through absentee ballots than the Cow Counties. And, like we've discussed before, the undeclared voters skew young thanks to the way AVR works in NV, and therefore will go to Harris.
I'm expecting pretty much a repeat of 2020 in Nevada.
No
The only time I can say things definitively looked hairy in Nevada was leading up to 2014 when it became clear Dem turnout in Clark was going to be like half of what it was in 2010 (also a very bad election!) In all the elections after, with most statewide races in single digits, I've never had the sense that early vote analysis (even from the vaunted Jon Ralston) could conclusively tell us who was going to end up on the right side of a low to mid single digit win. The early vote stats in Nevada look just as "bad" as they do in Colorado this year and I don't think anyone expects Trump to gain ground in the latter when election results and trends in recent years are horrendous for the CO GOP. Republicans are voting earlier, Democrats are voting later, I just don't know what conclusions can be drawn from that besides "2020 was weird". I say this not with confidence/optimism (Democrats might not show up on election day and we do badly), but also not with pessimism (Dems very well might show up in force and also we get a good split with independents and swing voters). Ask me in 8 days for better analysis! ;)
My read on Nevada is that Trump is probably up about 1 in the votes already banked *if* indies break 57-43 Dem and partisans break 95-5. Those are the imputed numbers from the 2022 Senate race when Masto outran the party split by 36k votes. That was a big change from 2020 when Biden ran 6k votes behind the party split. The number of indies in NV has absolutely exploded since 2020 as 'indie' is now the default for people who automatically register. Dems probably have some ground to make up, but it really depends on the indie split and/or crossover voting.
About those 95-5 partisan splits I think its very possible, in fact I might even say its likely, that there's still some residual anti-EV bias among Republicans and also that whatever tiny percentage of pro-Harris Republicans exist that they are more likely than the median Republican to vote early.
I don't put a lot of weight on either the partisan split or the indie split in isolation, because there's no way to disentangle them. If you have a more favorable partisan split you can get away with a less favorable indie split, etc.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me if you're right that registered Rs crossing over to vote Harris would be more likely than other Rs to vote early, at least by mail. Rs seemed ok with voting early in person even in 2020.