The natural cynic in me is loathe to ever partake in analyzing early voting numbers, but there is one exception. Jon Ralston has a long history of breaking down the data in Nevada and has proven that his model should be taken seriously. With that said, it's panic time for Kamala Harris.
Ralston has released his latest blog on the early returns, and they paint a picture of a race slipping away from the Harris campaign. Things are so bad that she'd now need to dramatically overperform with independents to make up the difference.
Zeroing in on the Key Polling Data That Could Spell Grievous Disaster for Kamala Harris
Republicans have increased their statewide lead to 31,000. That’s right at 5 percent. It had been 29,000 after Day 7, so the increase slowed down. But the Rs still have a 6.1 percent turnout edge over the Dems in a state where the Dems no longer have a substantial voter registration edge, so Dems must win indies to win Nevada. They need to win indies by about 5 points if the GOP turnout edge in the final electorate is 5 percent; if it’s 6 percent, that means they have to win indies by a couple more points.
So the Dems have to start changing the electorate more to have a chance, even if they are doing well now with indies. They don’t want to be trailing by 30,000 ballots going into Election Day. Why? If the final balloting were to take place with the current electoral mix, the Ds would have to win indies by 10 points, even if Trump lost 5 percent more off his base than Harris did with hers.
Possible? Maybe, but pretty unlikely.
Of note is that Ralston is a left-wing Democrat. If he's saying this, it's not to make Republicans feel better about themselves. On the contrary, for him to be this blunt says the situation is dire for Harris. When you start talking about a nominee "changing the electorate more to have a chance," that's never a good sign. There is no good reason to believe Harris is going to remake the electorate and win big with independent voters. I'm not saying it can't happen, but there's no reason to think it will happen.
We can talk about the makeup of the electorate and the Dems probably doing well with indies (remember Biden won them by 6 in 2020, according to exit polls), but this turnout pattern greatly favors the Rs. And there is almost no way to say anything other than that the Dems need to do a lot of heavy lifting to make this a race by Nov. 5 (and beyond).
Ralston does just a bit of coping in the above excerpt by noting that Biden won independents by six points. Kamala Harris is not Biden in 2020. She's not even close, with Trump far outperforming his position in this cycle compared to four years ago. The vice president has to win independents by a large margin or she's going to lose Nevada, and it's getting tougher to imagine her doing that.
What does that mean for the other swing states and the election as a whole? Nevada was supposed to be Harris' best shot at taking a sunbelt battleground. If she loses there, it's highly likely she'll lose Arizona and Georgia as well. Further, early vote totals in the Rust Belt, while harder to gauge, also don't look good for Harris.
Could the vice president lose Nevada but clean up elsewhere to win the election? It's not impossible, but at that point, we are getting into scenarios that just don't make much sense. It's been obvious for a while that the Harris campaign and Democrats (including the press) are freaking out, and now we know why.