What happens in Vegas … probably doesn’t have a huge impact outside of Vegas, except maybe from the perspective of expectations-setting going into Super Tuesday, when the prizes in the more-populous states are much bigger. And if a contested National Democratic Convention happens (which is looking significantly more likely, given the cluttered primary field and mixed bag of state-level polls that we’re seeing), it’s likely that every single delegate is potentially important!
We’re talking, of course, about the Nevada Democratic caucuses, which will happen on Saturday afternoon. Everyone has their fingers crossed that Nevada will not be marred by the same sort of technology failures that plagued this year’s Iowa caucuses. Party officials have already tried to streamline the process, switching from a planned app to a simpler reporting method using Google Forms. However, volunteers are already expressing worries about confusing instructions and poor training on how to use the vote-recording system, as well as about the system’s security and just simple mechanics, such as whether every caucus site has Wi-Fi adequate to transmit the results.
On the plus side, unlike Iowa, Nevada is using a weird hybrid of caucuses and early voting, so many Nevadans have already successfully voted. In fact, party officials estimate that around 70,000 Nevada Democrats voted during the four days of early voting, which nearly matches the 86,000 total votes in the 2016 caucuses (when there was no early vote). So, if nothing else, it looks like Nevada turnout is on track to be more in line with New Hampshire’s turnout this year (which broke records) rather than Iowa’s (which was disappointing and spawned much hand-wringing).
As with Iowa, the Nevada caucuses are closed (open only to Democrats), and each precinct’s caucus is subject to a 15% viability threshold, going through two rounds. Supporters of candidates who are not viable in the first round can reallocate, based on their second choices, in the second round. Results from each precinct’s caucus will then be consolidated to determine statewide and congressional districtwide winners, where, again, the 15% viability requirement also applies. Also, like Iowa, news organizations will report three sets of results from the caucuses: the first round of votes (the “first alignment”), the final post-allocation alignments, and then the total number of delegates to county conventions that the candidates win (which serves a similar purpose as Iowa’s notorious “state delegate equivalents”).
One aspect of Nevada’s early voting that was unconventional was that instead of asking voters to pick one candidate, as on a standard ballot, the state’s ballot asked voters to make at least three choices and rank them, so that supporters of unviable candidates could still have their second (or third or fourth) choices reallocated. In that way, it at least somewhat mirrors the method of the in-person caucus, even if it doesn’t quite resemble the dynamics of what actually happens in the caucus room. (Also, it remains to be seen how well the state party’s spreadsheets deal with the deluge of data when trying to merge each precinct’s in-person votes with the ranked early votes, which is an additional wrinkle that Iowa never had to deal with!)
Nevada has 36 pledged delegates up for grabs in 2020, which is slightly less than Iowa had, but more than New Hampshire did (and a drop in the bucket compared with the 415 upcoming in California). They break down as follows:
- 8 at-large statewide delegates.
- 5 statewide delegates drawn from party leaders and elected officials (aka “PLEO” delegates), allocated in the same way as the at-large delegates.
- 5 delegates in the 1st Congressional District.
- 6 delegates in the 2nd Congressional District.
- 6 delegates in the 3rd Congressional District.
- 6 delegates in the 4th Congressional District.
Nevada also has 12 superdelegates, who are not pledged to any particular delegate and may vote as they wish in a second round of balloting at a contested convention. These include Nevada’s two Democratic senators, its three Democratic representatives, its Democratic governor, its five DNC members, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who qualifies as a “distinguished party leader.” Of these 12 individuals, two—Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford—have endorsed Joe Biden, while two of the DNC members have endorsed Elizabeth Warren.
As we saw in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the 15% viability threshold will be a real killer for candidates who are on the cusp. Currently, according to FiveThirtyEight’s current polling average, only two candidates are currently viable: Bernie Sanders at 27% and Joe Biden at 15%. Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are both not far from the cutoff, with each of them at 12%, so it’s possible that either or both of them could squeak over the line thanks to second-round allocations, the last few remaining undecided voters coming off the fence, or both. (Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar are further back, at 11% and 9% respectively. Michael Bloomberg is also polling at 9%, despite not actually being on Nevada’s ballot.)
So how many candidates squeak over the threshold can play a significant role in whether Sanders emerges from Nevada with a decent-sized net number of delegates, or whether, as in the states before it, the outcome essentially winds up a wash. In other words, if only Sanders and Biden are viable, and Sanders still has a significant lead over Biden, then the allocations would be something like 5-3 statewide, 3-2 with PLEOs and in the 1st District, and 4-2 in the other three districts, for a combined 23-to-13 win for Sanders over Biden, probably Sanders’ best possible scenario in Nevada.
A race with four viable candidates, however, could go as low as, for instance, 2-2-2-2 statewide, 2-1-1-1 with PLEOs and in the 1st District, and 2-2-1-1 in the remaining districts. This would lead to a total of 12 for Sanders, 10 for Biden, and 7 each for Warren and Buttigieg. So you can see how the simple question of whether Warren ends up at 14% or 16%, for example, has a disproportionately big effect on the ultimate result in the chase for delegates, which, of course, is what matters for purposes of the nomination.
Also, there’s always the possibility that some of the candidates might fare better or worse in some of the state’s congressional districts than in others. And it’s true that Nevada does have considerably more demographic differences among its congressional districts than we saw in Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s, though the differences may still not be great enough to move delegate numbers one way or the other.
- Nevada: 48% white/9% black/8% Asian/29% Latino; 21% 20-34 years/16% 65+ years
- NV-01: 30% white/13% black/8% Asian/45% Latino; 23% 20-34 years/15% 65+ years
- NV-02: 66% white/2% black/4% Asian/23% Latino; 20% 20-34 years/17% 65+ years
- NV-03: 53% white/8% black/14% Asian/18% Latino; 20% 20-34 years/16% 65+ years
- NV-04: 43% white/13% black/6% Asian/32% Latino; 20% 20-34 years/15% 65+ years
Most notably, the 1st and 4th districts, in the denser parts of the Las Vegas area, are the most heavily Latino parts of the state. It’s possible that these districts therefore might turn out to be disproportionately better for Sanders than the other parts of the state. This may seem counterintuitive, based on how things went in the 2016 primaries. However, one of the most important and least-discussed subplots in the 2020 primaries is Sanders’ strength among Latino voters; this year, he has a bigger lead among Latino voters than he does among white voters, which is a definite reversal from the 2016 breakdown within the Democratic electorate. That may in fact be what’s keeping Sanders at the front of the pack this year, seeing that he lost a fair number of his 2016 white supporters to either Warren or Biden.
A countervailing trend, though, is that the 1st and 4th congressional districts are also where most of the state’s African American voters live, and, based on polling crosstabs, that’s Biden’s strongest constituency, so those two trends could largely minimize each other. The district to watch most closely for a stronger showing from Warren or Buttigieg may well be the more affluent and educated 3rd District in Las Vegas’ suburbs, given that their strength tends to lie with a more upscale coalition than those of Sanders or Biden. (The state’s other district, the 2nd, covers Reno and almost all of the rest of the non-Las Vegas part of the state, and it tends to behave more like the rural parts of other western states rather than like the diverse Las Vegas metro area.)
Doors open for the caucuses at 10 AM local (Pacific) time, though the actual voting doesn’t happen until noon. It’s possible we’ll start seeing some results in the late afternoon, though officials have been warning that, given the possibility of Iowa-style chaos, there won’t be a clear sense of the full results until Sunday at the earliest.