Jon Ralston, the editor of the The Nevada Independent and an expert on politics and elections in the Silver State, predicted Kamala Harris would win the swing state with razor-thin margins—if the Democratic candidate can overcome a substantial early voting lead by Republicans.
In 2022, Ralston correctly predicted Republican Joe Lombardo would win the gubernatorial race against Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak. He also correctly predicted Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto would win her reelection bid in the same election. Like the 2024 election, the polls had the candidates in both races neck-and-neck until election day.
Ralston also correctly predicted Nevada would swing for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2016 and 2020.
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On Tuesday, Ralston predicted Harris would prevail with 48.5% of the vote, while former President Donald Trump would win 48.2%. This scenario would be a significantly closer election than the 2020 race, when Biden won Nevada by over 33,000 votes, according to data from the Nevada Secretary of State.
Recent polling seems to align with Ralston’s prediction, showing the two candidates in a dead heat the weekend before Election Day, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregator.
However, Harris has to overcome a substantial Republican lead after Nevada’s early voting period ended last Friday. In the last few elections, Democrats have dominated early voting in Nevada, building what Ralston called a “firewall” in the party stronghold of Clark County—the state’s most populous county and home of thousands of Democrats in urban Las Vegas.
But this election cycle, Republicans embraced the process. In a remarkable reversal from past elections, registered Republicans returned over 45% of all early voting ballots, according to the most recent data from the Secretary of State. Registered Democrats only made up 27.7% of early voters, while independents and other parties made up 26.8%.
But Ralston predicted that Harris will start closing this gap as more mail-in ballots from Clark County arrive in the next few days. She will then have to rely on winning independent voters and in-person turnout to prevail on Election Day.
Nevada’s seven electoral votes are crucially important to both campaigns—if they win there, they only need to win in one of the other tossup states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, or Georgia to prevail.
Ralston also predicted Democratic incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen would prevail against her Republican challenger, Sam Brown. Most recent polling shows Rosen with a comfortable lead against Brown, a relatively recent Texas transplant.
Ralston’s prediction—and his sterling track record—have drawn comparisons to a recent poll published in the Des Moines Register by veteran local pollster J. Ann Selzer, which showed Harris winning the Midwestern state by three points.
Most polling throughout the election cycle has shown Trump continuing his dominance in Iowa, but Selzer accurately predicted his wins in 2016 and 2020. In the last presidential election, she accurately predicted Trump’s seven-point lead in the Hawkeye State, despite national polls showing margins much closer.
