As has been widely reported, early voting began Monday morning in Florida. Being from this state, and knowing the vast importance of the state to both campaigns, I have decided to try and breakdown these numbers to give a better idea of how the state may vote on November 4th. According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, "460,939 Floridians have voted early in Florida as of 8:40 a.m. Thursday morning (October 23rd)
link.
That is 460,000 people waited the long lines at the early voting locations out of a total of 10,744,090 registered voters in the state of Florida; meaning that approximately 4% of the state has voted in only three days.
Now a full county-by-county breakdown of early voters would take entirely too much bandwidth to compile, so I will instead try to address the major counties in the state, based on the population of the counties, which will give a fairly good representation of the entire state
link
In alphabetical order:
Alachua:
Within its borders, Alachua County holds the city of Gainesville, the nationally famous home of the University of Florida. It is one of the few counties that went for Kerry in 2004, as it relatively youthful population ensures that it remains a democratic stronghold within the state.
So far this week, the Alachua county supervisor of elections is reporting a turnout of 9,372 early voters. However, as the Gainesville Sun reports, this number is sure to rise after the appearance of Michelle Obama in Gainesville on Wednesday:
When she asked students to raise their hands, they appeared to be about a third of the crowd, which was estimated by Gainesville police at between 10,500 and 11,000 people. It included families - from at least as far away as Ocala - and many seniors, as well.
She urged her husband's supporters to vote now just in case there's a flat tire, cold weather or illness on election day...
"There's a [voting place] a block away, and you can vote until 5 p.m. So I'm going to close this thing out so you can go vote," she said near the end of her 35-minute speech.
The Alachua county registered voter party affiliations are spread out as follows: of 140,534 registered voters, 39,720 voters identify as Republican, 73,309 identify as Democratic and another 23,416 do not affiliate with any partylink . I glanced through the early voting name rosters for party affiliation, as the Florida Secretary of State’s office does not provide that statistic, and it seem that the majority of early voters are Democrats, which one would expect based on the make-up of this county.
Brevard:
Brevard County is known as the "Space Coast" by most Floridians—not to be confused with Spaceghost Coast –to –Coast for those Adult Swim fans out there. It contains the cities of Melbourne, and Titusville, both large population cities whose economies depend on a combination of government industry and tourism to survive. The county houses three bases Air Force Bases—though one could be attributed to NASA rather than the Air Force—which are Patrick AFB, Cape Canaveral AS, and Kennedy Space Center. Boeing also has a large presence there, and this has a large affect on the politics of this region. Of the 336,566 registered voters in the county, 148,938 identify themselves as Republican, 124,241 Identify themselves as Democrats and 50,641 do not identify with any party.
Brevard County went for Bush in 2004, and I don’t recall that I have ever seen it go for a Democrat in a Presidential race. Despite its relatively close registration numbers, Brevard County has remained thoroughly devoted to the Republican Party.
FloridaToday.com talks about early voting in the county on its website:
Brevard County Assistant Supervisor of Elections Duwayne Lundgren has a piece of advice for early voters . "Wear comfortable shoes. There will be lines," Lundgren said. "That's one thing they can depend on. There will be lines."
Early voting totals are on pace to swamp the county's initial estimate of 18,000 total ballots, Lundgren said. When early voting started Monday, 3,085 Brevard voters cast ballots. On Tuesday, the pace increased to 3,267 voters, and he estimated that more than 3,000 ballots were cast Wednesday.
The official results , as reported to the Florida Secretary of State’s office are 9,732 votes cast in the first three days of early voting. link. By doing a word search for the word DEM, which the state uses for Democratic Party affiliation I was able to discover that of those roughly 10,000 voters 5,166 are Democrats, and 3,231 are Republicans—not too bad in a county where Dems are outnumbered.
Broward:
Within Broward County sits the beautiful city of Ft. Lauderdale. Situated on the Atlantic coast, Broward is nationally known for its beautiful beaches, high priced real estate, and unlucky streak during recent hurricane seasons. Broward can also claim the title of the second most voter registrations in the state, only trailing Miami-Dade in total voters. It is also one of the most liberal areas in the state of Florida, with over half (504, 105) of its registered voters identifying themselves as Democrats. Only 238, 677voters identify as Republicans and an obscenely large 207,060 are not affiliated with any party link. This large number of independent votes in a liberal county allows Democrats a great opportunity to pick up votes to counter the nearly entirely Republican rural areas of the state.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports:
South Floridians aren't always the most patient of people. But something about the performance of one's civic duty seems to have brought out a degree of social decorum, even among those enduring long lines at the polls
Thursday, Day Four of the two-week early voting period, saw waits ranging from 30 minutes to two hours at Broward's 17 polling places. Folks passed the time gabbing on cell phones, rocking babies, solving crossword puzzles, furrowing their brows over sample ballots or simply staring into space. All with the kind of civility rarely seen in a shuffling, snail's pace line.
Of the 46,070 link early voters in the county (using my CTRL+F method) I learned that there are over 34,000 Democrats that have voted and only around 7,000 Republicans so far. Now I was skeptical of these results, seeing as the search method spits out names in that search as well (such as Demetria or Demitriakos) so to counter that I rounded down to 34, 000 by several hundred for Democrats, and rounded up to 7,000 for republicans by around 100, and I also scanned almost all 3000 pages of the names list just to be sure, and it seems very plausible.. So there seems to be a big enthusiasm gap in Broward County.
Miami-Dade:
I stuck Miami-Dade here, as I grew up just calling it Dade County, and so it goes here in the order. Dade can claim the largest population of any Florida county, a sports team in just about every pro sport, and a horrible CSI spin-off. It is also one of the most expensive places to live in Florida.
According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, of the 1,186,787 link voters registered in Dade County alone, 523,721 are registered Democrats while 373,026 are registered as Republicans. Again Dade County has a disproportionately large No Party Affiliation crowd of 275, 082. This again is an area where Obama must win heavily among independents to counter the Republican vote in the Panhandle, Rural Florida, and the Republican leaning I-4 Corridor.
The Miami Herald Reports that:
the first week of early voting is typically the slowest.
''Anything is possible,'' Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola said when asked how high this year's numbers could go.
Sola had expected a total early-vote [sic] turnout of 250,000 to 300,000 -- but the number could rise"
After searching through the results of the early voter reports for Dade County the number after three days are as follows:
56, 298 total votes link
33,250+ Democrats (that is after rounding down almost 650 to account for names picked up in the search method).
15,000 Republicans (not rounding down at all)
Again, another relatively large enthusiasm gap.
Duvall County:
Duval County lays claim to Jacksonville. Home of the Jaguars, and host of the yearly Florida vs. Georgia game, or "The world’s largest cocktail party" a dead horse name ESPN likes to beat into their viewers once a year. I really like to think of Jacksonville as the Jekyll and Hyde of Florida cities, as its downtown area is amazingly beautiful, but its poorer neighborhoods are amazingly poor, and thus the city puts up a nice façade from the drive up I-95.
Of the 500,000 voters in Duval County, nearly 224, 000 are Democrats, and 188,000 are Republican. There are an additional 70, 000 voters unaffiliated with a party. While this is much less than Broward or Dade Counties, 70,000 voters is enough to push this county either way. This is the likely reason Palin visited here a few days ago.
Also, according to the Florida Times-Union, Jill Biden is expected to make several stops in North Florida this afternoon, on her way to the I-4 corridor. She will certainly be pushing the GOTV message, as Michelle Obama did in Gainesville. Duval went to Bush in 2004.
Early Voting Results:
Democrats: 25, 500
Republicans: 13,400
The I-4 Corridor:
Ok, I realize this is not a county, but this is probably the most sought after area in the entire state of Florida this election. In truth it is difficult to break this down by county, as what might seem like a small county population-wise, might have in it urban rather than rural voters due to the geographical make-up of the area. Places like the Four Corners (The newly incorporated region bordering Lake, Polk, Orange, and Osceola counties) have sprung up in recent years and consist of mainly employees traveling to either Orlando or Tampa for work each day and a metric crap-ton of retirees. Interstate 4 runs between Tampa and Daytona Beach, and therefore the I-4 corridor encompasses counties such as Pinellas, Hillsborough, Polk, Lake, Sumter, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Volusia counties. Instead of breaking this are down county-by-county, I will be listing the aforementioned county statistics here link:
The interesting thing about this area for electoral politics, is that those 600,000 independent voters are reachable by two media markets—Tampa and Orlando. So, purchasing ad time in those media markets nets a campaign access to 3 million voters. It is no wonder that the campaigns spend so much time here. This area alone can win or lose Florida. In 2004 Tampa and its surrounding counties went to George W. Bush, while only Volusia and Orange County went to Kerry.
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Early Voting Results are as follows:
Palm Beach:
Finally, we get to Palm Beach County. Palm Beach is the home of tons of old people, the infamous hanging chad, and the Great Schlep. Registrations will be largely Democratic, but Republicans may still have a chance. There are still quite a bit of NPA registrants here, and some Democrats may still be unsure about Obama. Let’s hope for the best here.
Total Registrants: 803, 756
Reg. Republican: 242,342
Reg. Democrat: 365, 982
No Party Afil.: 164, 647
Early Voting Results:
Democrats: 21, 500
Republicans: 5,700
Please remember that early voting trends may not be indicative of election results. I compiled this data to try to give an idea about early voting results for the first three days in Florida. Many of these numbers are rounded a little to account for errors in the search methodology, as it would have taken months to manually search all voters for party affiliation. However, these numbers also seem to indicate a distinct enthusiasm gap between the parties. If we can continue to get out the vote for Democrats in Florida, we may just render these 27 electoral votes for Obama this year.
*** Update ***
Rachel Maddow did an excellent piece on the early voter lines in Florida. The video can be seen here.
here