After years of Democratic dominance, Nevada could be slipping from Biden's grasp

[mahatmakanejeeves]

After years of Democratic dominance, Nevada could be slipping from Biden’s grasp

The Silver State hasn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004, but polls this year so far show Donald Trump with a lead.

By Maeve Reston
May 19, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

LAS VEGAS — For nearly two decades, Nevada was one of the most promising opportunities for Democrats on the battleground map — an epicenter of labor power with a youthful, highly diverse population that held many of the elements of a winning Democratic coalition. … But at a time of deep frustration about housing costs, inflation and gas prices, recent polls suggest that Nevada could be slipping from President Biden’s grasp — highlighting his broader struggles to win over younger voters, Hispanics and Americans without a college degree.

No Republican presidential candidate has won Nevada since George W. Bush in 2004, but Democratic margins have narrowed in recent presidential elections. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by fewer than 34,000 votes, or 2.4 percentage points. Now, the latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows a dramatically altered political landscape for Biden in the Silver State.

In a theoretical six-way matchup that included third-party candidates, Trump led with 41 percent support among registered Nevada voters, while Biden won the backing of 27 percent. In a head-to-head matchup, Trump was supported by 50 percent of voters to Biden’s 38 percent.

In that two-way matchup, the Republican nominee held a striking 13-point lead among 18-to-29-year-old voters and a nine-point lead among Hispanic voters — two groups Biden won easily in 2020, according to exit polls. Among voters who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, a demographic that in recent elections has shifted toward Republicans, Trump held a 21-point lead over Biden. (Only 27 percent of Nevadans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to census data.)

{snip}

Tyler Pager and Scott Clement contributed to this report.

By Maeve Reston
Maeve Reston is a national political reporter for The Washington Post covering the 2024 presidential race and the politics of the West. She joined The Post in 2023 after covering politics and five presidential campaigns at CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Austin American-Statesman. Twitter https://x.com/MaeveReston

[Lovie777]

1. Vote...........................

[MFM008]

2. NYT polls

Are prejudiced against Biden.

[Ruby Soho]

4. It isn't just NYT polls.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/nevada/

Emerson has Trump +5 in a multi-candidate race.

Zogby has Trump +12

Morning Consult has Trump +9 in a multi-candidate race.

Echelon Insights has Trump +6.

Noble Predictive Insights has Trump +7

Biden has not led in one Nevada poll this year.

One poll might be off. Two could be. Three maybe - but every single poll?

That doesn't happen often.

Biden has time to turn it around but most every poll in Nevada shows Trump up comfortably. Even if you ignore the NYT/Siena poll.

[TexasDem69]

7. Hopefully Nevada will go for Biden

But I fully expect it not to. And if we’re being honest, Georgia is gone too, and probably Arizona. North Carolina was never even a viable option. But that doesn’t matter because the Midwest is going to turn out for Biden and he’ll win Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to win reelection and put an end to the Trump/traitor era. God help us if he doesn’t.

[Ruby Soho]

8. Your scenario will still need for Biden to win the NE congressional district...

Or it's a 269-269 tie (assuming he loses the Maine district). That would deliver the presidency to Trump.

I think Biden wins Arizona but it'll be very close. I think Lake being the Republican nominee will hurt Trump.

[TexasDem69]

9. Yeah, this election seems like it's going to be really close

[Dulcinea]

15. Georgia's not gone.

No one wins GA without metro Atlanta, & Dolt 45's not popular here. Both Arizona & Nevada could potentially go blue.

[TexasDem69]

17. Biden won GA by less than 12,000 votes

Out of 5 million cast. And Trump is more popular than Biden in GA, which is a reversal of 2020. Biden may win there, but it would be shocking if he does.

[lees1975]

10. But several of those polls are NYT based, or cite NYT in their analysis.

Let's see what happens when a Nevada-based poll comes out.

How realistic is it, in a state where Biden won every constituency that is supposed to be all turned over now, and where the strength of his victory was won on the hospitality workers union vote, which is heavily hispanic and which has endorsed him, to look at these numbers and not see any factor that would lead to such a wide shift in voter responses? And wasn't Emerson, and Morning Consult, predicting Cortez-Masto would lose big to Laxalt?

[Ruby Soho]

12. The fact no poll has Biden winning is a concern.

It's much easier to dismiss a poll that feels like an outlier when there are multiple other polls predicting the exact opposite. At this time, almost every Nevada poll is in universal agreement: Trump is not only leading, he's leading by a pretty comfortable margin.

As to your other questions:

1. Very realistic. That's how incumbents lose all the time - the support that won 'em the election previously dries up. Biden won Nevada by just 2.4 points in 2020 - that despite polls having him leading by 5 points. Interestingly enough, Emerson had Biden winning by two. I'll also point out that the average of polls has Trump at 48% in Nevada. He won 47.67% in 2020 - or if you round up ... 48%. What does that mean? Biden isn't losing support to Trump. He's losing support to third party candidates or, in direct head-to-head polls with just Trump, to undecideds. The good news is that they probably will be easier to win back than if they were going to Trump overwhelmingly. But Trump is winning solely because he's been able to keep his support from 2020. And that's really the story across the country: Trump isn't doing better than his 2020 results, but Biden is doing significantly worse.

2. Emerson had Laxalt winning - yes. Morning Consult didn't have a poll from what I can see, however. The New York Times/Siena, though, did have the race tied, which was pretty much how it ended (with a very, very slight lean toward Cortez Masto - who won by less than a point). But two things: the race was extremely tight throughout and there were still multiple polls that had Cortez Masto winning. That last point is key because while polls can be wrong, at the moment, we're looking at every poll being not just wrong - but wrong by a lot if Biden pulls out Nevada.

What concerns me, beyond the fact Biden hasn't led in any poll in Nevada since October (Morning Consult had him up 3) is the discrepancy of Trump's lead when third candidates are added into the mix. According to RCP, Trump leads Biden +6 with just those two and when third party candidates are added, his lead balloons to nearly nine-points.

Lots of undecided/third party votes left for Biden to win back but he hasn't yet. I don't think Nevada is a lost cause but I believe the polls are showcasing problematic areas for Biden that he has to figure out if he's going to win the state in November.

[lees1975]

14. I'm not sure where you're getting your information.

All three composites in 2020 gave Nevada to Trump, even after the polls "narrowed," from a five point lead down to 2. You can check Jon Ralston's commentaries through the whole period of time, during which he kept saying Biden will carry the state, it will come down to the turnout that the hospitality workers union is able to get that will be the difference. In 2022, the polls counted Cortez-Masto's seat as a flip, part of the "red wave" they pushed right up to within a week of the election, and some even afterward.

Nevada has both a caucus and a primary and it's a bit quirky as to how it chooses delegates, but there, as in virtually every other state where there's been a GOP primary, more than 30% of the Republican vote went to someone other than Trump, and the exit polls, as in other places, show 25% of GOP respondents saying they won't vote for Trump. The results on the other side don't show Biden as either splitting with independent or other candidates who got less than 4%, but also show the turnout was significantly larger on the Democratic side than on the GOP side. It doesn't seem that any Nevada poll is counting the primary vote as a "factor" in its polling data, and they continue to miss their guess on the primary results, in some cases, badly. Either they're not connecting with the core group of voters, or their data gathering is skewed, or they are deliberately trying to make it look bad for Biden, all of which are plausible.

In a state where 67% of voters, in polls, are opposed to strict limits on abortion, and where there's a higher percentage of younger voters, Latino voters and women voters than other western states, and a much higher percentage of union voters, I think the pollsters are missing something.

[Ruby Soho]

16. I'm not sure where you're getting your information.

What three composites had Trump winning Nevada?

It wasn't RCP. They had Biden +2.

And it wasn't 538. They had Biden up by an even larger margin at +5.3.

Not sure what the third is but regardless, the two most widely attributed sites when it comes to polling, had Biden beating Trump in Nevada.

[lees1975]

18. Look at those polls two weeks before the election.

Neither of them had Biden in the lead. They saw where the trend was going and switched their narrative, which is a common practice among pollsters. Those lines aren't representative of what that composite was showing as odds.

But it's pretty clear that these being cited are based off the NYT Siena data. Still, even at that, look at how the voters cast their ballots in the Primaries. Not anywhere close to the pollsters predictions and with that much GOP opposition, he can't win the state.

This is midterms 2022 all over again, the party in power in the white house, conventional wisdom, blah blah blah, a red wave is coming, and then, poof, a week before the election they're scrambling to change their data and claim they never said it.

[Ruby Soho]

20. I don't want to sound rude but you're absolutely wrong.

Neither of them had Biden in the lead

This is just not true. Are you even looking at the data or just making up the data to prove a point?

Two weeks out from the election, both averages had Biden leading.

RCP:



Two weeks out, on October 20th, the average of polls according to RCP had Biden leading by 5.2 points. They had him leading. In fact, if you look at the image I posted, at no point, going back to September according to RCP, did Biden ever trail in the average of polls.

538:



Two weeks out, they had Biden up by 6 on average. In fact, going back to April, 2020, Biden did not trail in the average of polls at any point during the race.

So. your claim that neither of them two weeks out had Biden in the lead is just factually not true.

And I'll go on further: here's the betting odds two weeks out from the 2020 election (not quite two weeks, I could only find a website capture for October 22, but close enough):



As you can see, the betting odds two weeks out (well 12 days before the election) had Biden as the favorite to win Nevada.

None of what you are saying is true. At no point in 2020 did Trump ever look the favorite in Nevada. It's the exact opposite of what we're seeing today.

Those are just facts. Pollsters didn't just magically adjust their polls at the last second to show Biden leading after showing him losing the whole race (I have shown you that) - the bettors had Biden winning Nevada (even in August! he was the favorite):



(that website screenshot was from August 22, 2020)

Biden was the polling favorite in Nevada throughout all of 2020.

[GreenWave]

3. This is why magats will shit when they lose Nevada.

These polls probably have too many Caucasians in them to represent and too many land line phone calls.

[TwilightZone]

6. Pollsters adjust for demographics.

As they always have.

[lees1975]

11. Nah, these are way to contradictory and off from 2020 and 2022 actual results to be "adjusted for demographics."

The expert is the Nevada Independent, Jon Ralston, and when he makes a prediction, that will be an accurate one.

[GreenWave]

13. Not according to a pollster on MSNBC subbing at 7:00 2 nights ago.

[Lovie777]

5. We got this..............

[peppertree]

19. At this point, I'm relying on tarot cards