Nevada The early voting blog, 2024

 

Updated, 8:45 AM, 11/2/24

 

Good morning, blog mates.

 

Quick update because Girls Youth Basketball championships beckon:

 

First significant Clark mail dump (30K) was 6K in Dems favor. Add in rural and Washoe and state of play:

 

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GOP has 44K lead statewide, or 4.2 percent. That ain't nuthin'. (This is true data analysis.)

 

Clark Dem firewall up to 17K, but really interesting data point is indies are at 30 percent of Clark (218K votes) and…,that ain't nuthin'', either.

 

I still think Washoe is key, right now a problem for Dems with GOP+9K.

 

Gotta run to hoops. Go Valkyries! (That's her team.)

 

Detailed post coming this afternoon. Patience.

 

Updated, 5 PM, 11/1/24

 

Good afternoon, blog mates.

 

Before we get the last day of early voting stats in later tonight, a reminder of what it has looked like: Dems won the last day in 2020 after losing most of the first 13:

 

The current state of play in The Unicorn Year is this:

 

The Dems added a few more votes when Washoe mail was updated,but Rs still lead by 44,400, or 4.6 percent. The GOP lead has been slowly growing, but as it has slowed, its percentage lead has been cut by about a point from its apex.

 

At the risk of stating the obvious, you would rather be the party ahead by 44,000 ballots. So let’s see what that really means. Let’s give the Dems the best of it and say by tonight’s last mail dump of the in-person voting period, the Rs lead by 40,000 ballots. More than 1 million voters will have cast ballots by the end of today, more than 70 percent of the vote will be in.

 

The Democrats need to cut that margin in half, I’d guess, by Election Day, which I think is going to be very different this year because the GOP will have a much smaller advantage because Republicans are cannibalizing at least some of their vote. (One data guru tells me 82 percent of the GOP firewall right now were Election Day voters two years ago. There’s something happening here…)

 

There would seem to be a lot of Clark mail ballots still to come, which will help the Dems over the next few days, including the day after the election, I’d guess. (They can count until four days afterwards, but the overwhelming majority afterwards will come in Nov. 6, if past is prologue.)

 

Before tonight’s dump, 321,000 mail ballots have been posted by Clark. In 2020, the final number of mail ballots was 457,000; some think it could get to half a million. But let’s assume 450,000 for this modeling.

 

Let’s assume Dems win those extra 130,000 ballots by 20 points; that’s 26,000 additional ballots in their favor, which will translate into about as many votes. So it is quite possible they could cut the GOP margin in half after all is said and done. (It’s unclear how much in mail will be gained in Washoe and perhaps lost in the rurals, although the Clark number will be much, much larger.)

 

Let’s assume the Rs have a 20,000-25,000 raw vote advantage after Election Day. If it gets much beyond that, the chances for a Dem win get slimmer. I think Nov. 5 could be closer to a wash than the past two cycles because of the GOP frontloading. (No one really knows but I doubt it’s more than 10 -12 percent of the vote based on what we have seen.)

 

Let’s also assume that indies are just under 30 percent of the 1.4 million we forecast will turnout – could be a little lower. So let’s say 400,000 of them.

 

Here’s a look at how many votes the Dems would net with various advantages (I am assuming about 4 percent go to other candidates or none of the above, could be less or more but not by much):

 

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-early-voting-blog-2024