Earlier today, I posted a diary about the early vote in Florida, but the Miami Herald, which tracks the early vote in Florida, updated their numbers to include both Duval and Palm Beach counties. The numbers are better than we thought they were.
Here are the latest figures:
Early voting only:
Dems 391,238 (47.99%)
Reps 290,368 (35.61%)
Inds 133,698 (16.40%)
TOTAL 815,304
Here are the additional votes since the last report:
Dems +140,128
Reps +112,410
Inds +47,219
This was a huge day for early voting in Florida. Just shy of 300,000 ballots were cast in early voting, which is similar to the numbers we saw on Saturday - the first day of early voting. And before the Duval and Palm Beach numbers were added, Democrats led Republicans by just 20,000 early votes in the daily report. Now that these two counties have been added, we see that our lead for the day expanded to about 28,000.
Here are all the numbers, including both early voting and absentee/mail-in ballots:
Dems 965,360 (42.62%)
Reps 925,182 (40.85%)
Inds 374,261 (16.53%)
TOTAL 2,264,803
Let's hope Tuesday was even kinder to us than Monday was. In 2008, the total early vote plus mail-ins was about 4.4 million. We just might be on pace to reach that number again, even with the Republican-induced truncated early voting period. Btw, it merits repeating that at the end of the early voting period in Florida in 2008, we led Republicans approximately 45% to 37%. In 2004, we trailed 44% to 41%. If we end up with somewhere around 45% to 40% by the end of early voting, I believe we will take Florida. That's just my two cents.