After the first day of early, in-person voting, Republicans in many counties across Florida surpassed the sizable statewide lead in turnout that Democrats had been steadily building over the past month through mail ballots.
Early voting across much of Florida entered its second day Tuesday, as Republicans began celebrating their achievement in flipping the turnout margin. Fresh Take Florida, a news service operated by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, is tracking county-by-county figures in real time and analyzing them for trends and patterns.
Heading into Monday, Democrats were outperforming Republicans in 66 of Florida’s 67 counties, with a roughly 6% lead in turnout, ahead by about 65,500 mail ballots. The GOP flipped the turnout margin by day’s end and was extending its lead Tuesday. More than 2 million votes have been cast so far, compared to 11 million total votes cast in the 2020 presidential race in Florida.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about turnout,” Republican Party chairman Evan Power wrote on social media. “These early numbers make it clear that Florida Republicans are energized to vote.”
Democrats were still overperforming Tuesday in some of Florida’s most-populous, urban counties: Broward, Hillsborough, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange, Osceola, Palm Beach, Pinellas and Sarasota. Turnout margins were tight in Republican-heavy Collier County in southwest Florida. In slightly Democratic Duval County, home to Jacksonville, Republicans were voting in unexpectedly larger numbers this week.
Even with Election Day still two weeks away, the dramatic flip in voter turnout so soon favoring the GOP could signal successes for Republicans in their races. It also reinforced perceptions that Florida is increasingly a red state and GOP voters prefer to cast ballots in person, rather than mailing them.
It raised questions about whether Democrats were enthusiastic enough about their candidates and issues to bother voting this year – and how ballots from Florida’s sizable numbers of unaffiliated voters could affect election outcomes.
It wasn’t clear how much of this year’s results were the effects of a 2023 law by Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature requiring voters to request a new ballot before every election. Before the change, a voter could receive a mail ballot by making a single request every four years.
“We want to see several days before we start drawing conclusions about what the state of the turnout and state of the race is in Florida,” said University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting and elections.
Nationally, nearly 20 million people have already voted in the election, according to McDonald’s research. Among states that identify the political affiliation of early voters, those include about 45% who were Democrats and about 34% who were Republicans. Former President Donald Trump – who once discouraged mail voting as untrustworthy – has been encouraging Republicans to vote early.
Polls showed Trump comfortably ahead in Florida. The U.S. Senate race here and important votes on recreational marijuana and abortion rights were more competitive.
The overall shift in turnout this week cemented beliefs about Florida’s growing conservative sentiment among registered voters, partly driven by large numbers of Republicans moving here from other states. The number of registered GOP voters officially surpassed the number of registered Democrats by more than 1 million earlier this summer, the largest margin by either party since the late 1980s.
In Florida, with about 14 million active, registered voters, about 32% are Democrats, 39% are Republicans and 29% are unaffiliated or registered to minor parties.
Before in-person voting started Monday, when Democrats were still ahead with mail ballots, Democratic leaders were predicting their candidates would be competitive on Election Day. Even though the deadline passed earlier this month to register new voters for this election, volunteers were working to increase turnout, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said.
“We feel really energized by what work has been put on the ground to get us to this moment,” she said.
Democrats in Florida traditionally have been ahead in turnout before the start of early, in-person voting due to their voters’ comfort with mail ballots, while Republicans tend to catch up since they favor voting in person, especially on Election Day.
Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, has been known as a bellwether, with voters there correctly predicting the outcome of presidential races in all but one election since 1980. Back-to-back hurricanes are causing issues, said Jennifer Griffith, the county’s Democratic chair.
Pinellas County was known for having among the strongest absentee voting operations in the state. During the August primary, 78% of all votes there were cast by mail. Current, statewide mail ballot return rates were 39%. As of Tuesday afternoon, the county had a below-average return rate of about 35%.
Meanwhile, early voting there has been extended due to damage from the storms, and elections officials have moved more than two dozen polling locations.
“A lot of stuff has just gone completely out the window,” Griffith said.
In South Florida, the largest Democratic stronghold in the state, party leaders were appealing to Black and Hispanic male voters, along with young voters under 27, said Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens. Those groups generally have voted in smaller numbers.
“We want to talk to people who are on the fence or sometimes don’t engage at all,” Jones said. ___
This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at williamskylie@ufl.edu.
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