What Went Down In The 2020 Nevada Caucuses

I know we already discussed whether Warren would drop out if she has a poor performance today, but what is everyone’s bet on whether anyone will drop out by the end of the day, and if you think someone will, who?

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.