What Went Down In The 2020 Nevada Caucuses

For what it’s worth… This sort of thing (plus the utter lack of results) was our first inkling that something was wrong in Iowa too. Of course, that does NOT mean that Nevada will follow the Iowa sequence of events going forward.

Early voting is open in California, and 800,000 Democrats have already voted there. That’s a huge number, on one level. The total number of Democrats who voted in Iowa (177,000) and New Hampshire (297,000) was about 492,000. I don’t know if I have totally built into my mental model of the primaries how many people are voting early — and therefore unaffected by day-to-day events. Let’s assume many people who vote early knew who they were supporting weeks ago. That still means certain candidates (like Sanders) are banking a lot of votes early, so they can’t lose as much support if they do badly the debates. And it might limit how much candidates who are performing better lately (Warren) can gain. But in terms of California, 5 million people voted in the 2016 primary there. So we probably have less than 20 percent of the California vote in right now.

About half of caucusgoers report that this is their first Nevada Democratic presidential caucus (though I suppose they could have attended Republican caucuses, or those in other states, or for other offices) according to preliminary entrance polling. But there aren’t huge differences in candidate preferences between first-timers and caucus veterans. Sanders is doing a little better with first-time caucusgoers than experienced participants, while it’s the other way around for Klobuchar and Biden.