Biden Will Win Nevada by 1%

Nevada has 86% of its votes reported and won’t announce addtional results until later today. But it’s pretty easy to crunch the numbers because it has only 22 counties.

Nearly all of those counties are red except for Clark and Washoe, which are by far the largest in population. All you have to do is extrapolate the remaining votes, on a per county basis, to break the same way the existing votes have gone.

One pitfall here is timing bias, i.e., the later counted votes within a county may be distributed differently than those counted earlier. That’s quite possible if they are comprised of a differently distributed category (e.g. mail-in vs. in-person, early vs. later received absentee ballots, etc.).

According to the New York Times, “Remaining votes include mail ballots received on Election Day, those that will arrive over the next week and provisional ballots.”. So they’ll likely skew a bit but it’s not obvious in which direction. And 86% is a pretty good sample size.

The calculation below does this simple per-county extrapolation. My projected shares of the total may be off a bit due to excluding the effect of the two other party candidates, but the relative difference should be the same: Biden will win Nevada by about 1%.

I can’t seem to embed the spreadsheet in Medium but check my original post to see the calculation details: https://mco.dev/biden-will-win-nevada-by-1/.

Originally published at https://mco.dev on November 5, 2020.