Early & Absentee Voting Megathread - Build the Freiwal

[UncleSam]

Why is 2016 not a good barometer? It actually had competitive races unlike 2014.

I think he means in terms of turnout. However, I definitely agree - it’s not as though there’s any way of telling how the statewide races would’ve gone based on EV from 2014 because we got no meaningful results.

[UncleSam]

Dems clearly aren't matching 2016 in terms of the early vote + absentee differential, but it'll come down to independents. Plenty of reason to thinks indys will break more favorably for Dems this year than two years ago - which is why early voting reports don't really tell you all that much, even in Nevada.

[UncleSam]

Democrats had a good day in Clark. Won by 11% (45.4-34.4, 11.9K to 9K in terms of votes), added 2.9K to the freiwal, 26.1K total voted.

Firewall up to 18K. Tomorrow will be a big day for the Dems, Ralston is suggesting the culinary union has a GOTV push starting here.

God I hope so. It's still a long way to 35K.

Am I missing something? Their firewall is at ~3.5k statewide, not 18k? Wasn't their firewall at ~50k statewide in 2016 after EV?

[UncleSam]

Most of the Week 1 is in from Nevada, so it's a little easier now to compare it to the Week 1 vote from 2016. Everyone claims that, unlike other state, the Nevada early vote really is predictive. Here's what it looks like in aggregate right now compared to 2016:

Week 1, 2018

Democratic: 42.22% - 112,517
Republican: 38.84% - 103,496
Other: 18.94% - 50,472

https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/home/showdocument?id=5950

Week 1, 2016

Democratic: 44.50% - 151,020
Republican: 35.84% - 121,651
Other: 66,728

https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/home/showdocument?id=4543

The gap between registered Republicans and Democrats is actually smaller this year, which might seem counterintuitive. This race will clearly come down to independents. And before everyone automatically assumes they'll break for Rosen, it's worth noting that every recent poll has shown Heller leading among that group.

I still say it's a textbook tossup.

You forgot to add in absentee ballots.

Anyway the %s look better for Rs as compared to 2016 but remember that Rs outperformed expectations on Election Day massively in 2016 + won Indys by a surprising margin. Neither of those is likely to happen this year, so Rs HAVE to do better with the early + absentee vote to have a chance - thus far they are doing that, so tossup seems reasonable for the statewide races.

[UncleSam]

Iowa
Dems +33.7k statewide

D+14.7k in CD-01
D+16.8k in CD-02
D+11.9k in CD-03
R+9.7k in CD-04 (RIP Scholten)

The respective party leads in each district have grown considerably since last week.

https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/pdf/2018/general/AbsenteeCongressional2018.pdf

Compared to 2016 this represents slightly improved numbers for Dems in the 3rd and 4th districts, slightly worse in the 2nd, and almost exactly equivalent by % in the 1st.

[UncleSam]

Here is a breakdown of party registration of people who early voted in the NYT/Siena Arizona Senate poll. I posted this in one of the AZ poll threads, but am cross-posting here for its relevance to early voting as well.

It suggests that people with no party affiliation are breaking to Sinema.

I know everyone says “early voting numbers don’t matter” and the at might be accurate in other states but in AZ early voting is 80% of the election and as much of a proud dem in AZ that I am, we aren’t doing so good.

AZ-08 AZ-08 AZ-08

how many times does this need to be said

Wrong, CNN said Sinema lead Early Vote 54-43 and Marist said 51-47. Both of these Polls are just pure FANTASY.

GOP currently has a 116K Ballot Advantage in AZ. For starters for Sinema to be tied in the Early Vote she would need to have NPA Voters 70-30 in her favour. That is not happening, no way. ZERO Chance. Even if Sinema holds D's in Early Voting 94-6 and McSally holds Republicans let's say 88-12 Sinema still would need NPA Voters to break her way 68-32 or something like that.

So, the notion that Sinema is leading EV is completely Baloney.

FWIW, in the NYT/Siena poll, if you look at the microdata you can see how people with different party registrations who said they early voted voted, to see how they came up with McSally leading early voters. Caveat being that this is a small sample size, but if you want to actually see how they got their #s, you can see.

Counting unweighted #s of people, out of 178 people in the poll who said they early voted, 69 (39%) were registered Rs, 58 (33%) were registered Ds, and 51 (29%) were registered Ds.

The registered Ds split their vote 49-7-2 (Sinema-McSally-Refused_to_say)
The registered Rs split their vote 8-59-2 (Sinema-McSally-Refused_to_say)
The registered Indepents/NPAs split their vote 32-18-1 (Sinema-McSally-Refused_to_say)

In percentage terms, that is Sinema winning registered Ds 84%-12%, McSally winning registered Rs 86%-12%, and Sinema winning registered Independents/NPAs 63%-35%.

And overall, that comes out to Sinema winning the early voters 50%-47%.

Then if you apply the NYT/Siena polls weighting, that gets you to Sinema leading among early voters 51%-45%.

Granted, this does not prove that Sinema is leading with early voters, and these are small sub-samples.  But this is how Sinema can be leading with early voters despite Rs having a registration advantage. And indeed, Sinema is handily winning voters with no party affiliation in the sample, which is how she can win even if there is an R registration advantage. Granted also the sample could be somewhat off, and it is quite possible that McSally could be winning early voters (but probably not by much). We have had several polls all with Sinema winning or competitive among the early vote subsample. That does suggest that despite party registration, Sinema will at least be fairly competitive in the early vote, and then we have to see what the election day vote is like.

You are just being deliberately obtuse or willfully blind, you are smart enough that there is no way that you do not understand this.

Party registration /= votes. Duh.

That sample is way off by party ID though, particularly in terms of overrepresenting NPAs. In actuality the early vote % is 42.3-33.7-23.3 right now, no where close to 39-33-29. If you assume those %s on the actual party ID of early voters you get McSally 48.6 - Sinema 48.0%. And that’s assuming Sinema is winning NPAs by 28 points.

I’m not saying it is impossible for Sinema to win, but in order to win the early vote she has to win NPAs by over thirty or do substantially better among Ds than McSally does with Rs. And of course getting a boost with the final few days of early voting would help too.

[UncleSam]

Ralston reports DEM lead in Nevada was 100 votes short of 38,000 going into today.

So that means?

They are going to blow past the 40k margin easily

In Clark*, not in Nevada

The lead is like 14k statewide roughly, it’ll get to around 16k probably

[UncleSam]

Will there be a lot of nasty infighting if Heller loses, amongst Nevada GOP? Apparently a lot of the GOP there wanted to toss him and it was the national party pushing him.

Unlikely. The GOP had no one else to run anyway - if Heller loses Tarkanian sure as hell will too, and he was the only one the national party pushed out of a primary challenge. The reality is that Nevada is a lean D state in a lean (at least) D year.

Though writing obituaries (even in Nevada) is still premature - remember that the early vote in 2016 was a much larger lead for Ds than this one is statewide. That being said, with D enthusiasm as it is, it's hard to see why Ds wouldn't perform better among Indys and on election day than they did in 2016 - and they only have to perform a little better than in 2016 to win at this point.

[UncleSam]

So the Clark freiwal is over 47K, and 40K was supposed to be enough to make Republicans sweat. The statewide lead is currently over 23K (will probably drop just under once all the rurals are in), and 15K was the goal for Democrats... While that's technically not insurtmountable for Republicans, they would need the same kind of margin in raw numbers (not %) that they got on ED, as well as a hefty lead among Independents to just barely scrape by.

I'd say it's more likely that, once again, the polls were off in Nevada, and we get Senator Rosen and Governor Sisolak, and their races won't be nail-biters either...

Uh that’s not quite accurate. 22k statewide is a strong lead, but in 2016 the EV lead was 47k. Obviously Dems won by about 25k in the senate race in the end, meaning that between winning Indy’s and ED Rs gained 22k. If you assume 80% turnout then that’s a 18k gain, which would indicate Dems winning by 4K statewide if 2018 follows 2016 patterns exactly.

So in other words, a 2016 performance would yield toss-up / tilt D races. Of course, 2018 is not 2016 and Ds seem primed to do better on ED than they have in the past, perhaps battling it to a near draw. Additionally, Ds should do better with Indys than they did two years ago.

In other words, it’s a Lean D race in both the senate and governors races, but it’s not likely or safe based on these numbers. It is in fact a worse showing than Ds had in 2016 early voting, though only by a bit. Dems definitely turned up the heat a lot yesterday though - without that Clark performance things were going to look more like a pure tossup.