By james art 
Tuesday, November 5, 2024 | 2 in the morning
Sondra Cosgrove, a political scientist at the College of Southern Nevada and a longtime election expert, isn’t sure which candidate will win today’s presidential election.
“Day by day, what I think is going to happen is changing,” said Cosgrove, who is also executive director of Vote Nevada, the voting advocacy group.
Cosgrove is not alone.
Polls show the race between Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee former President Donald Trump is nearly even in Nevada and other battleground states.
In Nevada, Harris and Trump were even at 48 percent in the final Emerson College/The Hill poll released Monday, with a margin of error of 3.3 points. And Harris leads by three points — 49%-46% — in The New York Times/Siena poll released Sunday.
According to the FiveThirtyEight poll’s weighted average, however, Trump has a slight average lead of 0.3 points here.
“Other states are in the same situation with the polls going back and forth,” Cosgrove said.
The election is likely to be decided in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, only to see those states flip to Joe Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada add the Sun Belt portion of the presidential battleground map.
Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016, but saw them flip to Democrats in 2020.
A close presidential race is nothing new for Nevada, which is the smallest swing state with just six electoral votes.
Nevada has voted for the Democrat in every presidential race since Barack Obama won in 2008, but the margin of victory has been extremely narrow.
President Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by 30,000 votes, or 2.4 points. Hillary Clinton in 2016 beat Trump by 27,000 votes.
The result this time, according to the survey, will be largely influenced by voters.
“Nevada’s men and women break in nearly opposite directions,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a news release Friday. “Men split for Trump by nine percentage points, 52% to 43%, while women split for Harris by eight points, 52% to 44%.”
The women’s support for Harris comes as no surprise, given that the three Trump appointees to the US Supreme Court played key votes in overturning Roe v. Wade. The decision paved the way for a national push by Republican lawmakers to enact restrictive abortion bans.
“(Trump) just doesn’t respect women’s freedom or women’s intelligence to know what’s in their best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we believe in women,” Harris said last week during a campaign rally in North Las Vegas.
About 53 percent of the state’s 2.03 million active registered voters participated in early voting — both in-person and by mail-in ballots, according to the secretary of state.
According to the secretary of state, Republicans are leading the charge with 405,602 voters who have cast ballots. There were 362,424 Democrats who participated early and 304,614 nonpartisan and others.
Of registered Democrats, 247,530 did not vote. For Republicans, that’s 195,152 Nevadans who are eligible but have not yet voted; and 519,844 non-partisan and others.
“Both parties are trying to empty out the remaining voters,” Cosgrove said.
Cosgrove added that there are many young voters who have not participated in early voting. Gen Z voters — those born after 1996 who came of age during the Trump era — “could change things for Harris,” she said.
The challenge is to motivate them and give them the information to keep going, Cosgrove said. In Nevada, voters can register to vote at polling places on Election Day with valid proof of residency.
The presidential elections – no matter what – will give a historic result.
A Trump victory would make him the first president-to-be to be charged and convicted of a crime since his New York hush money trial. He would be given the power to drop other federal investigations against him. Trump would also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms in the White House, since Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Harris is vying to become the first woman, the first black American and the first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office, four years after she broke the same barriers to national office by becoming Biden’s second in command.
The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic Party list after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate led to his withdrawal from the race.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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