Today was Nevada Day, a state holiday visitors make fun of us for, but one that someone came up with a slogan for... “The Largest Celebration Of Statehood In The Country”
Today was also the end of week one for early voting in the state, and as many of you know, the GOTV machine here is well oiled. Its the same machine that delivered Reid a 6% win over Sharron Angle despite all polls leading up to voting day had him losing by as many as 4%.
This machine also delivered Obama victories in 2008 and 2012 by margins of about 12% and 7% respectively. Early vote was the driving force behind these margins, as Nov 8th voting started with an insurmountable lead which made GOP GOTV efforts futile on election day. More interesting, having been a precinct captain for Obama, the GOP had a noticeable and present field team and operation in multiple locations across the valley. Admittedly I am not as involved this cycle due to work schedule, but I have made an effort to identify GOP operational efforts here….Incredibly hard to find. So anecdotally, the early voting data you are about to see could produce even better results compared to 2012 if the GOP in fact doesn’t have a ground game here.
John Ralston believes if Ds get about a 60k Raw vote lead from early voting, then it is “bye bye Trump”
So! After voting early today, I thought I would dive into the early numbers released to see how they measured up versus 2012. Its been said by everyone that we run up the score in Clark County, try to break even in Washoe County, and not worry about the other counties with respect to closeness of early voting. But I wanted to see what those other counties looked like for shits and giggles…
So below is some highlights from data for week 1 of early voting in 2016, along with how it compares to 2012, for 6 counties in Nevada that have over 1k votes in week 1. You can see the spreadsheet directly here.
Some tidbits below
- 2016 Clark County Raw Votes is 437 votes higher than 2012 over same period of time.
- 2016 Washoe County Raw Votes give Ds about a 12% advantage, compared to 4% in 2012
- While losing in most rural counties, we are actually winning in 1 (Douglas County) by 700 votes. We lost this county in 2012 week 1 by 2300 votes.
- Current Total Raw Vote Advantage after week 1 = 38,858
- Total Raw Vote Advantage after week 1 in 2012 = 33,673….
So basically we need to net 22k raw votes to create an insurmountable lead this next week, I will be tracking it...
“Bye Bye Donald”
Side note:
I normally don’t early vote until the last day, but I was so pissed off about this ridiculous Comey situation that I got out of bed, complained to my wife, and then we went and voted early together. Is it possible people will be so fed up with this email BS that it will backfire on GOP and drive some voters out for HRC? It certainly motivated me.