Jon Ralston wraps up his excellent coverage of Nevada early voting, and the final numbers should give Harry Reid and Co. some confidence heading into Tuesday:
Republicans lost ground to the Democrats in the urban counties on the largest and last day of early voting Friday, surely giving Democrats hope that a surge to blunt the GOP momentum could carry over into Election Day.
The GOP still maintained a lead relative to registration in urban Nevada, but Democrats kept it to under 4 percent. When the rural data is in, as well as Washoe absentees, the statewide turnout advantage for the GOP is expected to be closer to 3 percent. In 2006, after Election Day, the GOP had a 6 percent turnout advantage, but the Democrats did not have a 5 percent edge in statewide registration, as they do now. And upwards of 65 percent of the overall turnout already has occurred.
Two-thirds of the Nevada vote is in. And while the GOP is outperforming the early vote, relative to their voter registration numbers, the absolute numbers look better for us:
Clark County:
Dems, 133,967
GOP: 108,771
Rest: 46,329
Washoe County
Dems, 27,914
GOP: 30,946
That's a 19,000-vote lead for Democrats. And remember, public polling shows Reid getting about 15 percent of the GOP vote, while Angle gets low-single digits of Democrats.
That wouldn't be enough to overcome a deficit with independents, but it's still a decent cushion to take in into Election Day.
Finally, while the numbers are encouraging, note that they do show an intensity gap:
D: 46.3 percent (actual registration is just under that)
R: 37.6 percent (actual registration is 33 percent)
Rest: 16.1 percent (actual registration is about 20 percent)
It's not that Democrats aren't turning out relative to their registration -- at least in Nevada, they're actually on the mark. But Republicans are far more engaged. And of course, non-partisans are underperforming. Mid-terms are base elections -- something that Republicans understood from January 1, 2009, and Democrats didn't.