In response to my post about early voting in Nevada, an astute (but admittedly partisan) reader from that state crunches the numbers, makes a few assumptions, and concludes that Romney has a pretty good shot at carrying Nevada:
For what it is worth here is my back of the envelope review of where we are at in NV. The NV early voting is now about D+6½ which is a modest improvement from week one. My working assumption has been we need to get below D+5 in the early vote to have a fighting chance. But wanting to stay optimistic I figured I would run a couple of calculations based on the independent spread and crossover votes as reflected in the latest PPP poll (Romney wins independents by 9%, 12% of Democrats vote Romney, and 8% of Republicans vote Obama). The NV early vote as of 10/31/12 at 11:30 is:
Dem – 235,514
Rep – 200,678
Ind – 96,872
42% of registered voters have voted so far (533,064) with probably about another 480,000 still to vote.
For simplicity I ignored the third party vote, assuming they will draw about equal from each party. Using the PPP independent and crossover numbers I calculated the current Obama vote as follows: 235,514 x 88% + 200,678 x 8% + 96,872 x 45.5% = 267,383 (50.2%). The Romney vote: 235,514 x 12% + 200,678 x 92% + 96,872 x 54.5% = 265,681 (49.8%).
Under these assumptions, Romney and Obama are within 2,000 votes. Since Republicans tend to vote more on election day that should give Romney a pretty good chance for a win.
The crossover and independent vote assumptions might be optimistic in NV, but I think they are possible, perhaps even conservative. I believe there are quite a few Democrats that will cross over to Romney this year and fewer Republicans that will crossover to Obama. I am quite biased, and this could be wishful thinking (I am sure the liberal NV political guru John Ralston would think so).
