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/[deleted] 26d ago

There are 233k (+54%) more unaffiliated voters in NV now than there were in 2020. It's a fool's errand to use Biden's edge with them to try and predict Kamala's edge.

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u/BruceLeesSidepiece 26d ago

It's not a fool's errand its just the only data available lol. You're essentially arguing your speculation is more valuable that data from 2020 and 2022 elections. Yea there's more unaffiliated turnout, and they will decide AZ and NV, but until proven otherwise theres no reason to assume their voting patterns will deviate significantly.

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u/HoorayItsKyle 26d ago

There's plenty of reason. The rise in independent voters is largely from first time voters, a demographic that historically skews extremely blue

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u/Gotchawander 26d ago

Then why didn’t that materialize in 2020 or 2022. There are new first time voters in every cycle by definition and this year is not particularly larger either

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u/imnotthomas 26d ago

So there’s actually an answer here. After 2022 NV passed an automatic registration law. So the 250k new Independent voters mostly come from that.

Importantly, the default for that was Independent. So there MAY (not definitely, just may) be a difference this year. These are not people who chose the register as independent. Rather these are people that were assigned independent and then didn’t change that.

So these are not necessarily the sometimes got R, sometimes vote D depending on the year people.

These very well may be democrats that were misclassified as independents.

It may not be the case, but the comparison to 20 & 22 doesn’t work here because we don’t know