Early Nevada Voting Brings Bad News for Democrats and Kamala Harris
Photo by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
Much of the consternation around the Democratic Party’s election fortunes has to do with polling, and how Kamala Harris’s larger lead after the convention has seemingly evaporated in places like Michigan. Polling has its drawbacks and is never going to give you the full picture, so many have held out hope that the polls are just reflecting statistical noise or some other weird quirk, and that once people actually start casting votes, things will look better for Kamala Harris.
As far as Nevada goes, it looks worse for Harris now that early voting has begun. Nevada is notoriously a very difficult state to predict, and many have tried and failed to understand a state concentrated around Las Vegas that is still so much more than just Las Vegas. Jon Ralston has earned the nickname “the Oracle of Nevada” for his decades spent in Nevada journalism informing him to the point where he correctly predicted the state’s outcome in 2012, 2016 and 2020. In 2017, he launched The Nevada Independent, and he published a blog yesterday detailing the early vote totals from Nevada and what they mean. Per Jon Ralston, it’s bad news for Democrats, as he said they “need more mail, lots of indies, or big trouble in NV.”
Headline: Rurals matter.Especially when they are turning out 3.5 points above their registration and producing landslide ballot wins (58-20) over the Ds. Consider that Other 22 percent will mostly go to Trump, too, and maybe we should be talking about the GOP firewall in the rurals this cycle. It’s up to 16,500 out of only 44,000 ballots cast — and that’s without allocating the indies.
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Dems are only winning the urban Nevada ballot race by 1 percent – 38-37.
If you extrapolate these early voting totals and assume this is indicative of how Nevada will go, Trump will win the state by about three percentage points according to Ralston’s math. However, he told New York Magazine last week that Nevada has become even more difficult to predict due to its automatic voter registration law that created a “tremendous explosion of independent voters.” Ralston calls them “zombie voters” – ones who don’t know they’re even registered – so predicting whether they even cast a ballot or if they do, whether they will follow traditional independent voter dynamics, is really anyone’s guess.
But what is clear in this batch of votes is that Trump has turned out the rural Republican vote in Nevada, and as the dynamics currently stand, is probably better positioned to win the state than Kamala Harris. Nevada is unique enough that it is hard to assume it is a harbinger of anything other than itself, but if this is the kind of rural turnout Trump can expect in this election, he’s probably the favorite to win the whole thing at this point.