As early voting came to a close in Nevada, many of the state’s most veteran pollsters, pundits and political operatives — no strangers to close elections and their accompanying jitters — are finding it uniquely difficult to predict what happens next.
Republicans, thrilled with their surprise early voting edge, say they are well on their way to making former President Donald J. Trump the first Republican to win the state since 2004. Democrats agree that Republicans have seized an unusual and anxiety-inducing advantage, but insist that their prized organizing machine will put Vice President Kamala Harris over the top.
But what’s making this presidential election different is the sheer number of voters who don’t officially identify with either party. Thanks to the state’s relatively new automatic voter registration law, nonpartisan voters became Nevada’s largest voting bloc in 2022, outpacing both Democratic and Republican registrations.
Figuring out who those voters are, and how or if they will cast a ballot, has been a crucial challenge for the campaigns scrambling to find and sway those last few persuadable people. Changes in voting patterns wrought by the pandemic four years ago are also throwing prognosticators for a loop.
“The Achilles’ heel of early vote analysis is that it’s really difficult to make cycle-to-cycle comparisons,” said Adam Jentleson, who was a senior aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the longtime Democratic leader, “and that has never been more true than in this cycle.”
All of those factors combined mean “you are flying blind,” he added.
The race is tied, according to The New York Times’s polling average. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris have visited Nevada multiple times, emphasizing that every ballot will make a difference.
As of Friday morning, about 46.5 percent of eligible voters had returned ballots — either in person or through the mail, according the Nevada Secretary of State’s office. Republicans are besting Democrats by about five percentage points, and they have swamped them with in-person votes. Democrats, however, are doing far better with mail ballots.
These returns represent a remarkable shift from four years ago, when Mr. Trump and his allies thoroughly disparaged every method of voting that didn’t occur in person on Election Day that early voting among Republicans declined. This year, the former president has offered a more mixed message, even as he suggests the method can’t be trusted. His party has put considerable resources into urging his faithful to cast their ballots early.
Nonpartisan voters, and voters from other parties, made up just 27.5 percent of the ballots returned, according to the Nevada Secretary of State’s data. The stat means that from now until Election Day, both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have a two-pronged mission: Ensure their respective bases show up, and chase down those nonpartisan voters whose choice is less clear, a dozen political strategists, candidates and organizers said.
Democrats, heading into the last day of early voting on Friday, sounded an urgent note.
Representative Dina Titus of Nevada, a Democrat who spoke before Ms. Harris on Thursday night in North Las Vegas, told a crowd of 6,000 that the Republicans were beating them.
“We cannot let that happen,” she said.
Halee Dobbins, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the Republican turnout so far was a reflection of enthusiasm for the candidate.
“Republicans in the Silver State continue to turn out and outpace Democrats in early voting because President Trump’s winning message is resonating with Nevadans,” Ms. Dobbins said.
Mr. Jentleson said this was the time for the vaunted organizing power of The Nevada State Democratic Party and the local unions to show their might. Their work is year-round, well funded and offers Democratic campaigns a deep understanding of the electorate.
Shelby Wiltz, who runs the Nevada Democratic Coordinated Campaign, which works to elect Democrats up and down the ticket, said the independent voters returning ballots were younger and fit the demographic profile of Ms. Harris’s supporters. Ms. Wiltz suggested that Republicans, by voting in person early, were cannibalizing the party’s traditional advantage on Election Day. Meanwhile, Democrats’ traditional supremacy in returning mail ballots has held steady.
“There are new dynamics at play,” Ms. Wiltz, who has worked in the state since 2018, said. “The good news is we know that a lot of these nonpartisan voters look more like our voters than Republicans.”
Jeremy Hughes, a Republican strategist who is closely tracking the returns, agreed nonpartisan voters were the unknown, but said he expected that their turnout would remain lower. Most significant, he said, Republicans have dramatically shrunk Democrats’ traditional voter registration advantage.
“Are some Election Day voters voting early? Of course,” Mr. Hughes said of Republicans. “You would much rather bank a vote now than have to bank a vote on Election Day.”
Partly as a result of the organizing and structure put in place by Mr. Reid, who died in 2021, Democrats have won the state in every presidential election since 2008. Even so, tight polling and data about who is voting early is worrying Democrats who had been confident Ms. Harris and Senator Jacky Rosen would prevail in tight contests.
Public polling has recently shown a closer race between Ms. Rosen and the Republican Sam Brown, who last week received $6.2 million in advertising support from outside Republican groups. The ads, along with regular appearances at Mr. Trump’s rallies in the state, have helped boost his standing and visibility to voters.
Internal Democratic polling shows a low single-digit margin in the Senate race, a source with knowledge of the data said, speaking under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal numbers. Ms. Rosen’s favorability ratings have declined, too, this person said, under a torrent of Republican attacks that have flooded in since early last month.
The mad dash to find voters, particularly the independents, and get them to the polls continued Wednesday night when Assemblywoman Angie Taylor, who is running for State Senate, knocked on the door of a home in a quiet neighborhood in Reno.
Based on data from a voter outreach tool on her phone, Ms. Taylor, a Democrat, expected to find two voters — middle-aged, white and registered as nonpartisans. Instead, Ethan Martin, 19, opened the door. His parents, the voters Ms. Taylor wanted, weren’t home.
Mr. Martin, who is also registered as a nonpartisan, didn’t show up on Ms. Taylor’s list. He said he planned to vote at the University of Nevada, Reno, where Ms. Taylor used to work, the next day. They gabbed about a teacher of Mr. Martin’s who Ms. Taylor knows and shared a laugh.
But he declined to say who he supported in any race, and Ms. Taylor moved on to the next home, still wondering if Mr. Martin would vote for her and Ms. Harris.
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