Joe Biden narrowly won Nevada in 2020 by just over 30,000 votes. The state has strong union support for Democrats but anyone expecting a clear Harris victory there this year might be in for a surprise. Hometown reporter Jon Ralston estimates that about 60% of the vote in the state is already in and so far Republicans have a big advantage.
We are at 790,000 ballots recorded, or 39 percent of registered voters. So I’d guess about 60 percent of the vote is in, maybe a little less. We are going to get at least 75 percent of the vote in before Election Day and maybe as much as 90 percent because of how the GOP has frontloaded its vote…
The GOP’s 40,500-ballot lead (5.2 percent) is now solely a product of the rural firewall. The urban numbers are a wash – Dems up 6,300 in Clark and Rs up 6,300 in Washoe.
From there, Ralston uses past turnout as a guide to how much of the vote is left and where each party is expected to win. But the bottom line is that, unless something dramatic and unexpected happens, it’s not looking good for Harris.
So adding numbers from the rurals, Clark in-person and Clark mail, we get: GOP+20,000…
Could Harris win Washoe by 20,000 votes? Very, very unlikely, especially because Rs have a ballot lead now. Biden won Washoe by almost 12,000 votes.
Why is this happening? Politico Magazine has a story up today which says the shift in Nevada is at least partly the result of ex-Californians who’ve been fleeing to the state in droves.
Since 2020 alone, over 150,000 Californians have moved to Nevada — California expats today make up over 20 percent of Nevada’s population. County to county migration flows from the last census show that of the top 16 counties supplying new residents to Reno’s Washoe County, 11 of them are in California…
It’s not clear exactly how many of these voters are Republicans. Nevada certainly has its fair share of California liberals who have moved into the state — many conservatives here complain that liberal “refugees from Commie-fornia” have driven Nevada politics leftward over the past two decades.
But the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in the state has shrunk from 111,000 in 2020 to 71,000 in 2023, and the number of nonpartisan voters has exploded…
According to [businessman Joe] Dutra, most ex-California business people he knows are just like him — staunch Republicans who “just believe in less regulations and lower taxes.” And he thinks there are more of those reliably Republican voters here now than ever before.
“I think I’ve seen a lot more people moving out in the last four years,” he says. “It’s been a big push.”
Democrats can run up the popular vote in California, but driving Republicans into other states may be having an impact on those states over time. As one ex-Californian told Politico, “California just got to be a communist state.” He added, “[It was] Kamala Harris, it was Governor Newsom, it was a leftist, anti-business legislature who just felt they had to control everything.”
