COLOR NEVADA RED IN 2024! GOP up by 44,000 votes (submitted) in early voting!!! Re-Post

Via Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent.  GOP is up HUGE so far - and will likely win Nevada (along with many of the down-ballot races.

Good evening, blog mates.

GOP lead is up to 44,400 statewide, or 5.2 percent.

Dems finally eked out a win in Clark combined mail and in-person, but by a measly 10 votes. Not enough to fend off the ongoing rural landslides. And Washoe, which has a reported mail backlog, remains in GOP favor by about 5 percent.

Essentially the entire GOP lead is in the rurals, which are turning out significantly higher than Clark's 41 percent, except for Lyon, which also happens to be the largest rural vote source. The rurals continue to punch above their weight by more than 3 points while Clark is down 4 relative to voter reg and Washoe is up 1. This dynamic will change once the urban mail gets counted, but that is a substantial lead for the Repubs.

More than 856,000 voters' ballots have been posted. That's 42 percent of registered voters, but amounts to more than 61 percent of the turnout if it's 1.4 million, two-thirds if it's only 1.3 million.

Details:

More tomorrow. Sweet dreams, blog mates.

Updated, 10/30/24, 1:40 PM

10/30/24

Good afternoon, blog mates.

A bit pressed for time, but I am going to do a lot here, including:

1. State of the vote.
2. Modeling the rest of the vote

I will try to do a detailed down-ballot post later, but suffice it to say, the GOP lost a little ground in Clark on Tuesday but everything that was in play is still in play.

State of the vote

We are at 790,000 ballots recorded, or 39 percent of registered voters. So I’d guess about 60 percent of the vote is in, maybe a little less. We are going to get at least 75 percent of the vote in before Election Day and maybe as much as 90 percent because of how the GOP has frontloaded its vote.

In 2022, 79 percent of the vote was in before Election Day, and in 2020, it was 89 percent. I’d guess it will be somewhere in-between but I’ll keep close track of it.

The GOP’s 40,500-ballot lead (5.2 percent) is now solely a product of the rural firewall. The urban numbers are a wash – Dems up 6,300 in Clark and Rs up 6,300 in Washoe.

The worm turned a bit for the GOP on Tuesday, but just a bit. The Republicans still have a large turnout advantage – just under 8 percent statewide – and it is more than 9 percent in Clark., which continues to underperform its share of the electorate. (This has to change as the rurals run out of votes and Clark mail comes in. How much will be key.)

The Clark lead for the Dems is under 1 percent (!), which surely heartens Republicans. But Dems saw a slight ray of sunshine with the increased nonpartisan share of the vote and the younger voters therein.

The numbers:

Modeling the rest of the vote

With such a large percentage of the vote in, I can now start to model, with history’s help, what the rest of the vote might look like, within a reasonable range. I am not just guessing here, folks. Even though this year is a unicorn, even unicorns have to walk a similar path to past horse races. (Not thrilled with that metaphor, but leaving it.)

Let’s go region by region and extrapolate what the final vote counts could be:

RURALS

Trump won the 15 rural counties in 2020 by just under 70,000 votes. Let’s say he can get that number to 80,000, which current numbers suggest he could achieve, maybe even more depending on if rural turnout gets above 80 percent. Rural nonpartisans traditionally are about 2-to-1 for the R candidate, so let’s use that as a max number and say rural turnout is 80 percent.

Here’s a chart:

I think that 86,000 number may be a bit high, so let’s set the rural baseline at Trump+80,000. (Can always adjust one way or the other as votes come in.)

CLARK IN-PERSON

Figure about 100,000 more people vote in next three days (may be a little more or less). If past is prologue, Rs will continue to not do quite as well as they, Dems could win last day as they did in 2020. But, let’s be conservative and say GOP wins the in-person by 43-31.

See those extrapolated final numbers:

For the sake of this extrapolation, let’s say the final EV number for in-person in Clark is: Trump+40,000 (It could be significantly less if those indies are very D.)

CLARK MAIL

So far, we have 276,000 Clark mail ballots and Dems are winning them, 44-26.

Let’s be conservative and say they go 25K a day for next three days, so 75K more by end of EV. That’s 350,000. Could be a little higher.

In 2022, just under 2/3 of Clark mail had been received by the end of early voting. If that is the case this year, then we will have about 525,000 total. But let’s be conservative until we see a mail deluge, if one is coming.

Here’s what various scenarios look like if the mail percentages stay the same with a very small increase to a larger one – I will adjust this model if the 44-26 split appears to be changing:

So for the sake of this extrapolation, let’s say the total is 500,000 mail ballots and the Dems win them by 100,000. (This may be a rosy projection for them, or perhaps not.)

Yes, you GOP folks wondering where the extrapolations are with GOP winning Clark indies, I am not including them because if that happens, it’s game over for the Ds.

So adding numbers from the rurals, Clark in-person and Clark mail, we get: GOP+20,000

I think the rurals could be a little less for Trump and the Clark D advantage could be a little bigger, so this may be a worst-case for the Dems. Or not.

So, as always: It comes down to Washoe.

Could Harris win Washoe by 20,000 votes? Very, very unlikely, especially because Rs have a ballot lead now. Biden won Washoe by almost 12,000 votes.

If I’m off a bit on these projections – and I will adjust them in either direction as votes come in – Harris may not need to win Washoe by 20,000 votes. For instance, what if Trump does not win the rurals by 80,000 but by 70,000, as he did four years ago, and the Clark mail is even larger than it seems to be? Then every Washoe vote could count. And we will be here for weeks…

There are a lot of variables: How big will the GOP turnout advantage be? Can Clark get to more than 70 percent of the overall vote and drive down the influence of the rurals? And can Dems win indies by enough to help offset their losses in Clark in-person early voting and the rurals?

Still a long way to go. I’ll update the models every day.

Praise, criticize, donate, please.