Democrats have not won a state wide election in Florida since the Earth cooled. Will today be different? Polls generally still have Biden leading. Nate Silver’s poll of polls still has Biden up in Florida by a reasonably comfortable 2.5%. That’s quadruple the 0.6% lead Silver gave Clinton in Florida on election day in 2016. In 2016 trump won by 1.2%. If we apply that election day error of 1.8% to this election Biden still wins by 0.7%.
However, there is more direct data from Florida than mere polling. We have actual ballots cast and “results” of a sort from it. In Florida one must declare party affiliation. While we don’t know who the voters actually voted for, we do know how many voters from each party voted. Those numbers are concerning.
In early voting Democrats did better than Republicans, but arguably not by enough. Democrats voted in mail massively more than Republicans, but Republicans outnumbered Democrats strongly in early in-person voting. The result was nearly a wash.
Florida Early Voting (both mail in and in person)
Democrats = 3,548,112
Republicans = 3,432,696
Non-Party Affiliated = 1,962,019
So in early voting Democrats enjoy an advantage 115,416 votes. The problem is that is out of what is likely to be around 10 million votes that will be cast. So far, in election day voting (as of 9:10 am on election day) Republicans are going to the polls more than Democrats by more than 2 to 1. In election day voting only, the early Florida returns look like this.
Democrats = 83,423 (24.4%)
Republicans = 174,997 (51.2%)
NPA = 77,167 (22.6%)
As a consequence the Democrat advantage of over 115,000 in early voting has plunged to less than 24,000 of all votes in just the first couple of hours of election day voting. It could be eliminated within the next hour.
Of course raising this concern assumes almost all votes from Democrats are for Biden and almost all votes from Republicans are for Trump. However, I think that assumption safe, and I say that as a registered Republican who voted for Biden.
It also ignores the non-party affiliated votes. That is the wildcard. What I see in the early voting patterns is that the NPA votes must break for Biden, and rather strongly for Biden, for him to carry Florida.
Tuesday, Nov 3, 2020 · 2:59:29 PM +00:00 · KeithDB
Update as of 10 am. As predicted the number of Republicans voting in Florida has moved ahead of the number of democrats voting. Republicans are now ahead by nearly 9,000 votes.
There is a big caveat. There is no election day reporting yet from Miami-Dade county.
There are some positive things to consider as well. More Democrats have already voted in Florida than voted in 2016. Total number of Democrats voting is nearly 101% of Democrats voting in 2016. Thing is, Republicans are also on par to exceed their 2016 with their votes totaling over 99% of what they were in 2016. The real surge is in NPAs. NPA voting in Florida is already over 104% of what it was in 2016. In 2016 the NPA vote in Florida favored Clinton by about 1.6%. I think it will need to be a good deal more of that for Biden to carry Florida.