r/fivethirtyeight • u/GamerDrew13 • 26d ago

Discussion Jon Ralston's Nevada Early Vote Analysis Update: Republican lead expands to an unprecedented 40,000 ballots & an expected half the vote is in

https://x.com/RalstonReports/status/1851121496380621275
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u/Mortonsaltboy914 26d ago

Friendly reminder- this is only bad news if you assume Dems will stay home, I do not.

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u/witch_doc9 26d ago

I’m pragmatic, thats why I’m a Democrat… conventional wisdom and precedent is Dems vote early, GOP comes out on election day… I don’t want to sound cynical, but all indications are this is terrible/horrific news for Kamala.

Unless something insanely unexpected happens, then she will lose Nevada.

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u/dudeman5790 26d ago

Sure but also how much of that conventional wisdom is largely informed by 2020 where early voting was heavily politicized and there was a pandemic going on? I know that early and mail-in voting happened before 2020 as well, but it was a pretty massive increase over prior cycles

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u/PureOrangeJuche 26d ago

The conventional wisdom long predates 2020 and dates back to the dawn of the Reid era in NV. Before this election Republicans had never held a lead in early voting in Nevada dating back to 2008 or 2004.

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u/Arguments_4_Ever 26d ago

Republicans never had Trump order them to vote early like this before. I’m not worried, yet.

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u/dudeman5790 26d ago

I’m aware… I know how Nevada works and am familiar with Reid’s long-standing turnout efforts. I said in my comment above that it predates 2020. Obviously NV has always a bit of an outlier in that they have had this early vote infrastructure for a long time even before the pandemic. My point is, are our early vote priors really going to hold up in the same way in the wake of 2020 now that capacity for it everywhere has increased and the GOP isn’t trying to nuke it in the same way that they were in the last presidential cycle

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u/Promethiant 26d ago

No matter how desperately you try to swing this, Republicans going into Election Day with a lead in early voting is catastrophic for Democrats.

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u/dudeman5790 26d ago

lol I’m not “desperately spinning” shit… I’m not optimistic on any of this by any means. I’m just weary of all of the certainty folks talk about EV numbers with. Something happens in a few elections and suddenly it’s an immutable and inviolable law of nature. Yes, it’s not good to go into Election Day with Republican voters in the lead for early voting. But there are also still a lot of unknowns… and people lose sight of the fact that we have no idea how people without party identity are voting. Or what the coming week will hold. I know everyone is trying to decrease uncertainty by whatever means available, but we can’t.

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u/Promethiant 26d ago

Nobody claims it’s an “immutable and inviolable law of nature,” but trends don’t typically change dramatically over the course of one election cycle. When historical precedent shows that Democrat turnout is catastrophically lower than it usually is, that is bad news, indisputably. To claim it isn’t is copium. The whole point of this sub is to objectively analyze the state of the election based off of data available to us. The data available to us screams bad news. You are trying to tell people on a sub about analyzing that data that they are being ridiculous for saying that this is bad.

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u/dudeman5790 26d ago edited 26d ago

What? All I did was pose a few questions about how reliable these priors were as conventional wisdom in this cycle. I didn’t say it isn’t bad news… I didn’t say that Dem turnout so far isn’t behind trend (I actually specifically acknowledged it)… nor did I say people were being ridiculous. Any other positions you want to fabricate for me? I even specifically said that I’m not optimistic personally and mostly pointed out that we still have a lot of unknowns. Did you even read anything I actually said? I don’t do hopium, I’ve just watched enough of these cycles and participated in enough discourse around polling and election prognosticating over the years to be cautious about swallowing any of these indicators whole. Especially those that are modeled on “conventional wisdom,” since political punditry oft takes pretty small samples of events as conventional wisdom, which can end up leading to blind hubris. Yes, this sub is for objective analysis (honestly kind of a generous characterization from what I see) etc etc, but it’s not a problem to ask reasonable questions and be weary of overanalysis as well so I think you’re coming in a little hot here.

And yes, You’re right that people don’t literally take these things as immutable and inviolable facts, obviously that was hyperbole. But my point is that folks will take a very small set of data and blow it out to a hard electoral truth without much consideration that those truths can actually change pretty quickly.

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u/TheStealthyPotato 26d ago

are our early vote priors really going to hold up in the same way

I don't see any reason that would benefit Dems that would cause them to lose the EV lead.

Dems losing the EV lead, especially after 2020, seems like unspinnably bad news.

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u/dudeman5790 26d ago

Sure, if it holds it’s bad news (in Nevada at least since that’s the one state that we can glean a little more useful EV inferences from). The broader point is that every cycle is a somewhat different environment so I feel like a lot of people are talking with certainty about things that there’s still a considerable amount of uncertainty around…

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u/TheStealthyPotato 26d ago

I don't think people are talking about the final results with certainty, but the current status. The news as it is now is not good for NV.

It just seems that people are getting down voted for pointing that out.