Early voting closes today, Sunday, November 1st. Let’s peek a little. The numbers are reassuring. In Florida, as the long week wore on, Democrats watched their early six-figure lead slowly slip away, like a hungry dachshund watching his toddler finish the hot dog without dropping any. At mid-day, ProfiloPolitics reported, “Republicans Lead Florida Early Voting by More Than 130,000 Ballots as In-Person Early Voting Ends Ahead of the November 3 Midterms.” Here’s the chart from the UF Elections Project:
Following a late afternoon surge, the Republicans held an early voting advantage of +153,000. It’s not exactly a blowout, not yet. But the turnout is comforting. In Florida, Republicans are turning out in higher numbers than Democrats— and the current +153K lead will only improve, since the GOP’s traditional election-day surge is waiting right around the corner on Tuesday.
Turnout of nearly 41% is solid and more than we need. Democrats led Florida’s early vote at this point in 2018 and 2020 —both Trump 1.0 years— and they still lost both times. It’s good, but not great. The GOP’s turnout margin is there, but much thinner than in the Autopen era. In 2022, the previous midterm cycle during peak mandate mania, Republicans led by +321,000 at this stage. In 2024, facing a possible Kamala, Republicans led by +847,000 when early voting closed.
As of this morning, the GOP is ahead— but far below its 2022/2024 lead, so it’s no time for conservatives to relax. Here’s yesterday’s Sunshine State map (I marked my little socialist utopia of Alachua County):
Forget about the polls. Florida’s polls have overstated the Democrats in seven straight statewide races, by an average of more than five points. The pollsters’ own trade group called 2020’s miss the worst in 40 years but didn’t understand why. It found “no evidence” that Trump supporters hid their support, but never settled on a cause. (The only profession where you can be so consistently and one-sidedly wrong is supervising the welfare fraud prevention office. But I digress.)
Turning to national turnout figures, we also find crumbs of comfort. UF’s Election Lab shows national Republican turnout trailing by 12 points. That sounds terrible, but it’s not the whole story.
First of all, these figures only include states that report votes by party registration. The list skews blue: it includes California and New York, but not Georgia or Texas. And Texas is a pretty big chunk. We don’t know the makeup of Texans voting, but we do know this: “Texas Early Voting Breaks Records” (WSJ, this morning).
I’ll take it as a good sign that Texas has clearly decided to go big.
Second, the national “independent” voters make up 25% of the total— and nobody knows how many of them pulled the lever for sane candidates. Including, in many cases, the independents themselves.
Finally, Republicans are expected to make up a lot of ground on Tuesday. Thus, for all those reasons, the blue lead is probably much smaller than it looks.
Keep the momentum going. Cement your Tuesday plan to vote no matter what and send out your text messages offering rides to your friends and family.
