Democrats are showing up for early voting around the country, including in Florida, where the party is outperforming its share of the early vote as of this point in the process from the 2018 midterm elections.
With two weeks until the election, Floridians have already cast over 1.2 million votes, most of which were mail-in ballots. Among 1,171,092 votes logged by the political analytics firm TargetSmart according to modeling of the voters’ partisan ties, Democrats are at 49.5 percent of the total, with Republicans at 44.7 percent. (These figures don’t reflect how people voted — just who’s voting.) The same point on the calendar in the 2018 midterms saw Republicans leading in turnout according to the TargetSmart data relying on voters’ modeled party. Republicans had returned 51.4 percent of the ballots, while Democrats had completed just 43.1 percent. Using the TargetSmart numbers utilizing voters’ registered partisan affiliations, Democrats are still in the lead now, and Republicans were leading at this point of the 2018 midterms in early voting, although the portions and margins are different.
Florida is among the leaders among states in terms of how many voters have already cast their ballots. California is past 1.3 million, but Georgia, another state towards the top, has yet to pass one million reported votes, and the ranking extends downward from there, according to data collected by the U.S. Elections Project. Not all states have any early votes reported yet at all. In Florida, two high-profile elections are unfolding, including the race for governor in which Republican Ron DeSantis is running for another term against Democratic nominee Charlie Crist, who is himself a former governor, although he held the post as a Republican. DeSantis and Crist debated each other this week, with predictably high-profile points of contention including reproductive rights and the flights organized by the DeSantis administration that took dozens of vulnerable migrants from Texas to Massachusetts. It doesn’t seem as though the DeSantis administration set up basically anything in terms of actually caring for these migrants — they just dropped them off.
“I thought what the governor did was a horrible, political stunt,” Crist said Monday. “We have an immigration problem. We have a problem at the border. We need to secure the border. I agree with all of that. But it doesn’t mean that you use Florida taxpayers’ dollars to charter two jets, go to Texas, lie to people to get them onto planes, fly them up to the northern part of our country, and one of them’s a one-year-old baby. Another is a pregnant woman. You’re willing to use people like that — in this case, they were Hispanics, Venezuelan in particular — and have them as props for your political game?”
