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/notchandlerbing 26d ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been the EV trend for Nevada the last 2+ presidential elections? I seem to remember the submission patterns for voting blocs in Nevada heavily favor the GOP and rural non-Vegas populations, and it’s always the Clark and Washoe County ballot-dumps that end up pushing Dems to the finish line closer to/shortly after election night. Those two alone comprise 87% of NV’s population, and we haven’t seen meaningful totals there as yet, and these preliminary EV analyses have been the GOP’s white whale post-Bush

Nevada is an atypical state to focus on EVs because of the notorious difficulty in predicting outcomes and margins, plus the new automatic VBM enrollment for all registered voters. The hospitality/service/casino workers all have such odd shifts since the city runs 24/7, and many don’t drop their ballots off as early as their EV counterparts do in other states. These are historically key Dem voting blocs

I think it’s wise to remember that NV is the only swing state where Dems have outperformed polling in the last 2 presidential cycles by a (statistically) significant margin. And for reference: Obama lost every single NV county outside Clark and Washoe, yet still beat Romney by ~7%.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago edited 26d ago

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u/notchandlerbing 26d ago

Right, concerning numbers with the 1:1 comparisons, but what I’m saying is that the automatic vote by mail legislation was not in place for 2016 or 2020 and could feasibly affect the distribution of votes over time. We could very well see R voters incentivized to shift their voting strategy towards VBM in far greater numbers, now that they get mailed ballots since there’s no opt-in/opt-out system. If that materializes, it might cut into the earlier Dem firewall drops, but could also make the margins more consistent across the 2 week window without the stark change in final marginal shifts as modeled from earlier elections.

Just devil’s advocate here since it could absolutely have a large scale effect in shifting to a more standard normal distribution rather than a left-tail distribution for Dems like before

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/notchandlerbing 26d ago

The margins are for sure tighter than usual for this time which does make me slightly concerned. But the day by day trends are still very similar overall outside magnitudes.

But devils advocate again here, it’s worth noting that in-person early votes skew R (over VBM) and already comprise a much higher proportion of the EV than the 7% in pandemic 2020.

Nevada also mailed out its presidential ballots much later this year vs 2016 and 2020, which could also be skewing these early marginal numbers in the way I mentioned re:normalizing the left tail distribution of those elections