The Morning Jolt

Elections

The Republican Jackpot in Nevada

Republican presidential nominee and former president Donald Trump reacts at a rally in Las Vegas, Nev., September 13, 2024. (Piroschka Van de Wouw/Reuters)

On the menu today: The Republican get-out-the-vote effort is going gangbusters in Nevada; remembering the obscure, forgotten guy who shaped the 2024 presidential race; the dangers of drop boxes and the perils of voting too early; and the right-of-center get-out-the-vote operation at work in key swing states that is operating almost entirely under the radar.

Banking the Early Vote

I don’t know how much of the vote you need to see to have seen enough, as Dave Wasserman often says, but you figure the cake in Nevada is baking pretty quickly. As Jon Ralston reports, more than half the state’s registered voters have already cast ballots — 700,000 of them, and so far, registered Republicans have turned out in bigger numbers than registered Democrats by a margin of roughly 40,000.

Ralston writes:

The Republican turnout edge is now almost 8 percent, almost 9 percent in Clark. The usually reliable Clark Dem firewall has all but evaporated (2,800), the rural GOP firewall is at 37,000 and Washoe is also going well for the Repubs (+5,800).

I know people want to keep comparing this year to 2020 or 2022, but at the risk of repeating myself: This is a unicorn year. We have never seen this.

As of September, Nevada has 1,975,000 registered voters — 593,223 registered Democrats, 574,270 registered Republicans.

For those who do want to compare this cycle to the last one, 1.4 million Nevadans voted, and Biden won, 50 percent to 47.6 percent, with a margin of 33,596 votes. “None of these candidates” received 14,079 votes, which amounted to 1 percent. President Biden’s job approval in Nevada ranges from 36 to 42 percent.

Whenever one party takes a lead in early voting, the other side will contend that the leading party is “cannibalizing” their Election Day vote. Yeah, that’s possible, but that’s something of a good problem to have. The more votes for your candidate you’ve got in the ballot box before Election Day, the less you have to worry about on Election Day. Every early vote is one more voter who can’t or won’t be kept from the polls on November 5 by a car breaking down or getting sick or some other unexpected obstacle. If the early vote is so meaningless, why do campaigns put such efforts into it?

“Way to go, Nevada, way to go” is a recurring catchphrase on the Three Martini Lunch podcast, going back to Nevadans’ 2010 decision to reelect Harry Reid, one of the most gleefully immoral senators to ever enter the chamber. (Yes, Greg and I have been doing this for 14 years!)

Reid, when confronted with the fact that he made up stories about Mitt Romney’s not having paid taxes, smiled as he replied to the reporter, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” He later insisted that making up a false rumor about Romney is “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” In that 2016 interview, Reid also insisted that Romney never released his tax returns when in fact he had, making us wonder if we were witnessing a Biden-style memory failure in the then-77-year-old Reid.

But the “Harry Reid machine” has saved Democrats in a lot of Nevada races over the years — Catherine Cortez Masto’s Senate reelection in 2022, Biden’s win in the state in 2020, Jacky Rosen’s defeat of Dean Heller in the U.S. Senate race in 2018, Cortez Masto’s first Senate race in 2016, and Hillary Clinton’s narrow win in the state in the 2016 presidential race.

Still, if the Harry Reid machine is going to save the Democrats again this cycle . . . where has it been the past few weeks?

2024’s Forgotten Man

As a public service announcement, I remind you that Joe Biden is still the president of the United States.

It’s easy to forget, because you see him so rarely, and apparently, that’s just the way the Kamala Harris campaign wants it:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has backed away from President Biden in the final days of the 2024 election, viewing the unpopular incumbent as a liability in her quest to succeed him, according to several White House and Harris campaign officials familiar with the planning.

Officials on Ms. Harris’s campaign think that holding joint events with Mr. Biden would “only hurt her” at the most crucial stage of the race, as one adviser put it. That leaves Mr. Biden, who has expressed an interest in helping stump for her in the coming days, left to arrange his own, campaign-approved events through trade groups and unions.

Joe Biden spent part of his Saturday browsing in a Jos A. Bank store in Wilmington, Del. He apparently didn’t buy anything. You wonder if the poor old geezer is bored.

On Monday, Biden voted early; it was barely noticed in the busy news cycle. The Philadelphia NBC affiliate reported, “The president waited in line for about 40 minutes before he cast his ballot.” I know we all hate it when people cut in line, but I might make an exception for the president of the United States. Usually, the president’s a busy man with people to see and places to be and drone strikes to order. Apparently, Biden’s schedule is loose enough that he can stand in line for two-thirds of an hour at the Delaware Department of Elections.

He’s pretty much already retired, isn’t he?

I’d love to ask the president where he thinks he’s going to be such a help to Harris. He would probably answer “Pennsylvania.” His job approval in the Keystone State has bounced between 38 percent and 41 percent lately, which is about where he is nationally.

Biden is staring down the barrel of a shredded legacy. Yes, other Democrats are attempting to placate his hurt feelings by gushing that he ought to be added to Mount Rushmore. But we all know that if Biden were a phenomenally successful president with a record that belongs alongside that of Washington and Lincoln, he would be running for a second term. To hear Biden and Harris tell it, the only reason he’s not running for another term is because he had a cold during his lone debate with Trump and so performed badly.

The country has rendered its verdict on Biden, and you can argue that it drew an intractable conclusion right around the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal: No, the adults were not in charge. Biden assembled a record so indefensible that his own vice president is running on the slogans “Turn the page” and “We won’t go back.” He’s set up a buffet table of potent issues for Trump and Republicans — inflation and the cost of living, illegal immigration and the border, crime, a world full of autocratic regimes and their terrorist lackeys on the march and threatening our allies.

Hard Early Lessons from the Election Cycle

I’m fine with early voting. It’s proven particularly useful and popular in states hit by Hurricane Helene.

I think two weeks or so before Election Day is a perfectly functional window. I think the period of 40 days before Election Day that some states allow for early voting — Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, Vermont, and Virginia — is excessive. Forty days was enough for God’s great flood and for Jesus’s fasting in the desert, but you really shouldn’t need that long to cast a ballot.

Josh Marshall shares a story of a woman in DeKalb County, Ga., who reportedly showed up at the polling place seeking to change the vote she’d already cast. A hard lesson: Don’t cast your ballot until you’re sure! October surprises happen!

Second, if I’m going to vote early, I want my ballot locked up and secure in some building like a county courthouse or county office or some other polling place. I think drop boxes are a bad idea.

Having a giant pile of cast ballots sitting out in the middle of some parking lot, overnight and unmonitored, for weeks before the election seems like too much temptation for some politically obsessed yahoo who thinks he’s going to save the country by destroying somebody else’s ballots.

And lo and behold, look what happened, as our Haley Strack reports:

The FBI is investigating after two ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon and Washington on Monday, potentially damaging hundreds of mail-in ballots just days before the presidential election.

Portland police responded to a fire in the early morning, around 3:30 a.m., which they said had been set by an “incendiary device.” Across the state line in Vancouver, Wa., police also discovered an early-morning arson at a ballot box, at 4 a.m., along with a “suspicious object” next to the box. FBI officers told the media that they are now “coordinating with federal, state and local partners to actively investigate the two incidents.” Officers did not say if the arsons would be investigated as domestic terror events.

Hundreds of ballots in Washington were destroyed, according to Clark County auditor Greg Kimsey. Although the Vancouver ballot box had a fire-suppression system, it did not work. A powdered fire suppressant protected all but three ballots in Portland, and Multnomah County election official Tim Scott said the city would be able to contact the three voters.

Now, the perpetrator could be anybody, but Portland is rife with Antifa, the Proud Boys, “Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade” (police-car-torching Israel-haters), and “Trantifa” — you don’t want to know — as well as all kinds of garden-variety nutjobs.

Your neck of the woods probably has fewer mayhem-minded malcontents than the Portland area — that’s a low bar to clear — but if you’ve got a choice between a drop box in a parking lot or an actual building with door locks and alarms and all that, you should go with the latter.

ADDENDUM: Our Dan McLaughlin takes a long look at one other major right-of-center get-out-the-vote operation, one with an established track record:

Americans for Prosperity Action, the political arm of Americans for Prosperity. AFP Action, the libertarian-leaning, free-market super PAC of the Charles Koch network, hasn’t endorsed in the presidential race, after backing Nikki Haley in the primary. It’s not focusing its messages on the White House. But it has endorsed Republican candidates in seven Senate races, including most of the key ones still in play: Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Tim Sheehy in Montana, and Sam Brown in Nevada (its other Senate endorsement is Pete Ricketts in the Nebraska special election). The AFP network is also involved in 44 House races and overall is engaged in nearly 650 races across the country.

According to AFP Action, it is closing in on a million doors knocked for McCormick in Pennsylvania, as part of a broader outreach of 2.3 million voter contacts (counting phone calls), as well as 636,000 doors knocked for Hovde in Wisconsin (and 1.4 million contacts), 665,000 doors knocked for Brown in Nevada (and 1.2 million contacts), and 212,000 doors knocked for Rogers in Michigan (and over 500,000 contacts).

Overall, across door-knocks and phone contacts, the AFP-world campaign has reached over 11 million voters nationwide, including 1.9 million contacts for Moreno in Ohio and 1.7 million for Sheehy in Montana.

Dan concludes, “It is at least likely that voters who turn out for McCormick, Rogers, Hovde, or Sam Brown are a good deal likelier to support Trump than to support Kamala Harris.”

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