Nevada's early voting period is half finished.
Thursday night, we took a look at the extraordinary numbers from the Silver State. If you found any good news in that diary for John McCain, please contact Matt Drudge immediately.
In today's edition, I've got new charts, expanded old charts, more data, prettier colors, and a new Poblano-esque (okay, not really) projection model where I take a look at what the actual banked vote totals might be for each candidate.
Note: I've had this diary ready to publish for the last 4 hours, but I've been waiting for Washoe to report Friday's vote totals (which they usually do by 10 pm each night). They still haven't. So I'm going to publish with yesterday's Washoe numbers, and update the diary when the current numbers become available.
Note the new distribution of daily early vote totals for 2004. This was suggested by, appropriately, Actuary4Change. I've taken A4C's suggestion a step further and depressed each Sunday's 2004 totals by 50% because about only about half as many polling locations are open on Sundays as are on Monday-Saturday in Washoe. These 2004 daily numbers are still little better than guesstimates, but they're now slightly better educated guesstimates. The 2004 total of early voters (34,061) is actual and accurate.
You can see just how tremendous the early turnout has been for Obama in Nevada. The ground game is working.
In an Open Left diary, hekebolos reports on Absentee Ballot party breakdown data that I hadn't noticed was available from Clark County. (These numbers are also included in the projections below.)
Clark County (Las Vegas) takeaways:
- 807,271 voters are registered in Clark County. 23.3% have already voted.
- Democrats outnumber Republicans 382,807 to 259,975 (122,832 more), or by a 1.47:1 ratio. Democrats have out-voted Republicans 1.76:1 thus far in Clark.
- One bit of sobering news: the number of Democrats voting each day appears to have leveled off, while the number of Republicans has been gaining some slight momentum. Dems are still far outpacing Reps on a daily basis, but not quite by the margins we saw earlier.
Washoe County (Reno/Sparks) takeaways:
- 34,061 Washoe residents voted in the 14 day early voting period in 2004. 35,563 have voted in 6 days this year.
- Democrats only hold a 1,286 registered voter lead in Washoe, but 7,161 more Democrats have voted than Republicans thus far.
- There are a total of 231,470 registered voters in Washoe. 15.4% of them have already voted, not counting absentee voters. (An additional 7.8% have requested absentee ballots.)
- Detailed absentee ballot information is not available in Washoe County, but the Reno Gazette Journal reported Friday that, "Republicans have a big lead in requests for such ballots, more than 11,000 compared with nearly 7,000 for Democrats." Absentee voters will very likely narrow the overall early vote gap in Washoe significantly.
Can we make an educated guess as to what the actual vote totals for each candidate might be?
Sure!
Your eyes do not deceive you. Even in my genuine attempt at a "sky is falling" scenario in Nevada, Barack Obama is kicking all kinds of ass. With the obvious and important caveat that there's a long way to go before November 4, the numbers right now in Clark and Washoe are beyond outstanding.
Why just Clark and Washoe?
After the final voter registration figures were released, the AP reported that 87% of Nevada's registered voters live in Clark and Washoe.
As hekebolos helped me explain on Friday, if Obama wins big in Clark and Washoe, he wins Nevada:
The outlying counties gave Bush 66.9% of the vote in 2004. Assuming that percentage holds roughly the same in 2008, Obama would need to win only 53% of the combined Washoe County + Clark County vote to take the state.
Even in my "Bradley Case Scenario" (where I only give Obama 85% of Dems, 5% of Reps, and 45% of Indies), Barack is nearly matching the threshold for Clark+Washoe proposed by hekebolos.
On deck for tomorrow: Senator Obama is holding rallies in Las Vegas and Reno today. I hope the most important addition to DINEVN v4.0 tomorrow is a tremendous surge in Democratic vote totals for Day 8.