It’s the Sunday before election day and it’s the last day of early voting in certain FL counties (Miami Dade and Orange counties being among them). It is the Check your county elections office web site to confirm.
So here is the state of things:
- Saturday was the best day of EV so far for the Dems. Registered Dems outvoted registered GOPers by a significant amount. We now have a +32,322 more cast ballots than the GOP. In person early votes now represent 58% of all ballots cast. At the beginning of last week, vote by mail had the lead.
- The difference maker in FL, however, is the NPA (no party affiliated) vote. This vote is leaning Dem by a solid margin. That’s why HRC is ahead in all of these EV polls. These are actual registered independent voters (as opposed to the tea party Trump supporter who answers every pollster and IDs himself as “independent”). These voters are more diverse than the FL electorate as a whole and the white voters in this group skew younger. There is a lot of overlap between this group of voters and Bernie voters who were registered indies and voted in our primaries (FL was a closed primary). NPA voters now represent 21.35% of the total EV cast (1,201,715 votes).
- In short, it is quite possible that our net margin of total cast ballots (and this is just my own speculation) is closer to 200,000 votes heading into election day. Richard Cranium and other knowledgeable Florida Kossacks can correct me if my assumption is off base.
- The electorate continues to get more diverse. It is very likely to be under 67% white (more diverse than 2012). The electorate will be a true D+1, which is Schale’s go to model for this election cycle (if you went with party self-ID, this would probably be a D+3, but this election has made me think that party self-ID is something pollsters should rely less on in the future). So basically, you can throw those Bloomberg and Upshot polls of FL out the window. This is not a Republican leaning electorate.
- Miami Dade County has cast over 708,000 votes this year. It cast 879k votes in all of 2012. It is headed for 1 million total votes through e-day. If HRC maintains Obama’s 2012 margin across 1 million votes, she will net an additional 237,000 votes over Obama. If her margin improves, she would net an additional 300,000 votes. That’s the election right there. In Schale’s view, HRC is going to win Broward and Dade by 500k votes, which is his magic number. This doesn’t include the margins we will get out of Palm Beach, Orange, and Hillsborough.
- The key to winning the election out of Miami Dade’s margin has been our outstanding performance in the I-4 corridor and Trump underperformance in that region as well as North Florida. Orange, Osceola and Hillsborough Counties are coming in big for Dems. Polk and Volusia are underperforming for Trump. We are going to more than hold our own in the Tampa media market and Orlando media markets (basically our strong vote is going to more than offset GOP strong areas, and certain areas like Sarasota, which have a higher GOP registration, don’t vote as GOP as they register).
- Duval, in N. Fl, is underperforming for Trump. President Obama’s visit to Jacksonville has galvanized turnout there and we now lead in the EV in a county that the GOP has to dominate to win statewide.
So, we are on our way in FL. We do need another great day of early voting to finish off the period strong. Given the large number of NPA voters and irregular voters that have already voted, we have more voters to bring on election day to offset the Republicans. The public polls released today say this is a tied race, but it doesn’t feel like a tied race to me.
The Clinton campaign will know that they have won in FL by this evening, but that assumes that our election day vote turns out. The Clinton campaign has focused its EV on unlikely voters, and is depending on regular Dem voters to be dependable regular Dem voters and show up. Folks like me get little more than a text message to vote, and we just do it. I would note that the Clinton campaign has elected not to go back to FL for the remainder of the campaign because they are confident in the numbers. President Obama is there today (Orlando area).
My standing prediction has been that HRC will win FL by a margin of 300,000 to 500,000 votes. I think the data support that prediction. What the Schale analysis doesn’t take into account is the net positive cross-over support we are receiving from registered Republicans per Tom Bonier’s TargetSmart poll. When that materializes in the vote count, it will add a few points to our margin.
Moreover, although pollsters focus on the racial makeup of the electorate, I think HRC is better positioned than Obama to win a larger share of the white vote, due to her support from white women and NPA voters which include younger white millennial voters. In addition, I think HRC’s share of the white vote will be more evenly distributed across the regions of the country, which will make it a lot harder for Trump to mount any kind of a comeback in FL and NC, and I think it will hurt him in Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and other states as well.
In fact, if the election day vote is basically a draw and we preserve the margins that we have going, it’s quite possible that we exceed a 500k margin. That, however, is up to the voters of FL who have not yet voted. Get out and vote. Go to an EV place today (if open in your county) or hit your polling place on election day. GOTV if you’ve already voted. I made a bunch of calls to FL from CA yesterday. I can tell you that the system the Clinton team has set up has very accurate voter information, and I have been targeting potential Dem voters who are in red areas of FL. This is a well organized campaign. We execute. We win.
It’s winning time. We win FL and the election is over.
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