Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Wikimedia Commons
There are other election prognosticators, and then there’s Jon Ralston. The venerable commentator and editor in chief of the Nevada Independent is known among politicos as the only person who can credibly forecast a swing state’s electoral tilt based on early-voting data — a reputation he earned with correct calls in 2012, 2016, and 2020, as well as his deep knowledge of a quirky, tough-to-poll place. (Ralston is also known for his Nevada boosterism, including the hashtag “#wematter,” which he frequently deploys when tweeting about the state.)
No Republican presidential candidate has won the Silver State since George W. Bush in 2004. But Ralston thinks this year might be different — and that even if the race follows a more familiar, Democratic-friendly pattern, getting a handle on the outcome before November 5 will be challenging. I spoke with him about whether Democrats’ turnout machine can prevail again, why Nevada may have shifted red over the last four years, and how his beloved state could determine the election, even with only six electoral votes.
I’m quoting from the early-voting blog you maintain: “Unlike in 2020 when the Democrats had an 80,000-plus registration edge over Republicans, that partisan advantage has been greatly diminished to less than 19,000. That massive change in the Dem advantage should give Donald Trump optimism that he can break a 20-year drought for the GOP.” Why do you think there’s been this shift away from the major parties in Nevada, and especially away from Democrats?
I think it’s a little bit misunderstood by all but the crazy observers like me, who follow this stuff granularly. Certainly, there is some disaffection from the major parties by voters in Nevada, as is occurring in other places as well. But the main reason for the tremendous explosion of independent voters is an automatic voter registration law that started having an effect about three years ago. If you go to the DMV, you can register to vote as a Democrat or a Republican, but if you don’t, you are auto-registered as an independent and non-partisan.
So that has changed the dynamic. And I think a lot of these voters, who I call zombie voters — they don’t even know they’re registered. They don’t care that much about politics. They’re not that engaged. So it’s unclear what real percentage of those voters are actually going to cast a ballot.
And that makes your life a lot more difficult in terms of predicting this stuff. You’re the Oracle of Nevada — the one guy in the country who’s been pretty accurate with early voting data in the past.
What do you mean pretty accurate?
Sorry, I meant 100 percent.
But seriously, my crystal ball has cracks in it. It’s very, very difficult with this new orientation to try to predict. But my predictions are not just based on data, they’re also based on sources on the ground and even just my gut instinct. And I have to tell you, I had a feeling in 2020 and 2016 toward the end that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were going to win the state, even if not by a great margin. I really have no idea right now. It’s so close, and both sides think it’s within a point or so.
What have you seen or heard that makes you think it’s tighter this time than in ‘20 or ‘16?
We’ve been a swing state for a while, as you know, and we’re pretty purple. But you mentioned those registration changes. In the past, the Democrats have had a large enough registration cushion to make up for what is usually a Republican turnout advantage of a few points. It’s not clear this time that that’s true, which is why this huge cohort of 800,000 or so non-major party voters is going to play such a big role.
The great pollster Mark Mellman once said to me that there’s no such thing as an independent voter — they’re all either Republicans or Democrats who are just masked as independents. So the key to this race is which campaign is going to do better at finding who their independents are. Usually, I say in Nevada, if it’s a tie, the tie goes to the Democrats because of their ground game. But the first chink in that armor surfaced in 2022 when Joe Lombardo, the Republican candidate for governor, beat the incumbent Democratic governor, which almost never happens. Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent Democrat governor to lose, I believe, in 2022.
The Republicans have learned from the Democrats, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. They have gotten much more into data over the last few cycles. Not the Republican Party itself, which has been a joke for a long time, but people adjacent to it who understand this kind of stuff. They did models with independent voters last time — the question is whether the Trump campaign is going to listen to them or just believe this is a base election since it’s so close now in registration. So that’s just a long-winded way of telling you I have no idea right now.
The Democrats have that vaunted ground game there that you mentioned — the Reid Machine. I’ve been doing interviews with other swing-state experts recently, and I always ask about the Republican get-out-the-vote operation, because it does seem like a big question mark in a lot of places. Much of it has been outsourced, including to organizations like Elon Musk’s super PAC. And their strategy is to turn out really low-propensity voters, which is very much untested. Is that basically what you’re seeing on the ground?
I think that’s right. The Trump campaign itself — and my great reporter who’s covering the presidential race, Gabby Birenbaum, has done some reporting on this — has very little presence here on the ground. They’ve been completely dominated by the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party. But we’ve heard talk of Musk and company coming in here and trying to organize.
What people forget about this, and I learned this lesson a long time ago, is you can’t erect the kind of infrastructure you need to turn out voters overnight. That’s why the Reid Machine was so effective. They built all of the parts over time and then perfected them, and had great people who knew what they were doing pulling the levers. I’m not sure that Elon Musk can create a Tesla as opposed to a Ford Pinto here. I’m probably going to get in trouble with all the Pinto owners from yore, but you get my point. It’s not that easy to just turn out low-propensity voters, especially.
If it were easy, people would’ve done it a long time ago.
Exactly right. This has been a constant problem for Republicans in the state. But one of the reasons they have optimism this time is that the registration dynamic has changed and the Democrats don’t have the obvious advantage. As I’ve mentioned in every early voting blog I write, Democrats have been able to build up a firewall in Clark County of so many votes that it doesn’t really matter what happens in the rest of the state so much, because two-thirds-plus of the electorate is here. I’m not sure that that dynamic is going to hold this time. That’s why I think it’s going to be very, very close.
The economy and inflation are big issues everywhere, but particularly in Nevada, which has the highest unemployment rate in the country, and where inflation has hit particularly hard. Do you think that is one of the central reasons why Republicans are gaining a little ground in the last two to four years?
I think it’s part of it. Certainly, we were crushed disproportionately by COVID because of our one-note economy. Our unemployment rate was astronomical. As you mentioned, it’s still either the highest or one of the highest in the country, even though it’s still relatively low — it’s around 5 percent right now. But you have an economy that is based on service workers, many of whom lost their jobs and some of whom didn’t get them back, and the Republicans have taken advantage of that. I think Trump, or at least his campaign, has seen an opening there. That is why he has concocted this “no taxes on tips” idea to try to peel away traditional Democratic voters, whether they’re in the culinary union or elsewhere, and get just enough of the rank and file to disagree with their leadership’s endorsement of the Democratic ticket. Peel enough of them away in a close race, it could make a difference.
And Kamala Harris matched him on that policy, right?
She did, about a month later.
Which shows that it was potent — she had to do it too.
She knows that. Of course, neither of them have any idea how to implement it or whether it’s a good policy or not. But Trump has been very smart about —or his campaign, I should say — by urging everybody on social media to sign all their checks “no taxes on tips.” It’s been a gambit, and I don’t know if it’ll work, but what they’re trying to do makes some sense to me.
Do you think Kamala Harris has improved her standing among Hispanic voters compared to where Joe Biden was? There haven’t been a lot of high-quality polls in Nevada this cycle, but what was out there a few months ago seemed bleak. They’ve turned around considerably, and now Harris has maybe the slightest advantage. And I’m just wondering which demographics that improvement is coming from.
Well, unfortunately, there are never a lot of high-quality polls of Nevada.
Notoriously. But that seems even more the case this year.
Yes, notoriously is exactly right. But all of the polling in almost every demographic group turned around for the Democrats when Harris got in the race and Biden got out. Democrats here were really, really worried with Biden that they were going to suffer losses at the top and down the ticket. So a lot of those numbers have turned around, but clearly the fight for the Hispanic cohort is something that Harris and Trump understand. I mean, look at what happened last week. Harris did a national Univision town hall. Where did she do it? In Las Vegas. Trump, in response to that, did a Hispanic Roundtable on Saturday in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. So the fight for the Hispanic vote is real. That doesn’t mean Trump’s going to win it, but if he can get close to 40 percent, that could be a killer for her.
In 2022, Democrats did a couple points better in the Senate race, where Catherine Cortez-Masto won re-election, than they did in the governor’s race they lost. And if polls are to be believed this year, there’s a huge discrepancy between Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen, who is running well ahead of Republican Sam Brown, and Kamala Harris, in her razor’s-edge race against Trump. What accounts for that gap, do you think?
Since you called me the Oracle of Nevada earlier, I would like to give you an oracular response on this. But I have no Delphic wisdom, for you because this has puzzled me the entire cycle. I’ve talked to my staff and others about it — who are these Trump/Rosen voters? Rosen has run so far ahead of first Biden and now Harris. She has not been behind in any polls. She’s often been ahead by double digits or outside the margin of error. I don’t think she’s going to win by that much. She’s a solid favorite, though, and the Republicans haven’t quite given up, but they’re starting to warm up the band playing Taps.
I still think this is a very strange phenomenon. The only thing that I’ve been able to latch onto — and this is pure speculation, is that we have this crazy option on the ballot here, “none of these candidates.” So maybe there’s a bunch of “none of these candidates” Rosen voters here. They can’t bring themselves to vote for Harris for whatever reason, but they can vote for Rosen. And campaigns and candidates matter. Sam Brown has just not run nearly as good a campaign as Rosen has, and pretty much everyone on both sides acknowledge that.
What’s curious is that this pattern has really repeated itself all over the country with Senate Democrats outpolling Harris.
That’s right.
Pennsylvania is seen as the most likely tipping-point state this year, followed by other Midwestern states. I was looking at Nate Silver’s election blog, and he puts Nevada at only two percent chance of being the tipping point. How does that make you feel? Do you still matter?
Why are you trying to hurt my feelings right after we had such a nice conversation? This is so painful.
Hey, two percent is not nothing.
Listen, obviously, most people don’t see Nevada, with our small number of electoral votes, as important as the Blue Wall or as important as Georgia or North Carolina. But there are scenarios. I changed my Twitter picture many months ago to show one of those scenarios, to emphasize that we matter. But it’s a strange year in many different ways, as you know. There are a lot of combinations for either of them to get to 270, and many of them do include Nevada.
In 2016, I was on TV with a couple of former governors, doing a TV thing on election night. And suddenly I started getting these texts and direct messages on Twitter from a lot of national media types and others saying, “Are you sure your prediction is right, that Hillary’s going to win Nevada? Because Nevada’s going to be the deciding state?.
This was early in the evening when no one thought that the blue wall would collapse on them. But there are scenarios. Even if Harris loses Pennsylvania, the North Carolina and Nevada combination could make up for it in other ways. But listen, you are never going to get me off the “we matter” thing, even if reality intrudes.
I appreciate that admission.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
