Florida, similiar to other states, are reporting record mail-in ballot returns from early voting. As expected, registered Democrats are out pacing Republicans in mail-in ballot returns. As of today, 1.7 million voters have cast and returned a verified ballot. Currently, Democrats are outpacing Republicans by close to 2:1
The Democratic party would have been expecting a more decided advantage in mail-in ballots at this stage and the Republican party are preparing a massive game-day get out the vote operation on November 3rd. It should be noted that party affiliation is not an exact indicator of who the person voted for and should be used as a reference only. In total 9.4 million Floridians voted in the 2016 election based on this close to 20% of the State have already cast their ballots.
The Real Clear Politics rolling average of polls in the state of Florida, currently indicates a clear 4% edge in favor of Democratic party nominee, Vice President Joe Biden.
As with everything else in this 2020 election cycle, polling is hyper-political. I use the Real Clear Politics poll averages to follow the trend in favor of or against a candidate. Is momentum with them or against them.
Florida has been pretty steady as of late, veering between 3.7% and 4% in favor of Biden. With a slight momentum favor towards Biden in the last 10 days.
The curiosity in this battleground is that the polling does not bear any resemblance to hard facts on the ground. And by hard facts I mean voter registrations.
Before we look at 2020 we would do well to look at the state of play between the Democrats and Republicans in 2016. As a reference point. See Below.
In 2016, the Democrats held 330,000 more registered voters than the Republican party. Yet, Donald Trump won Florida comfortably, defeating Hilary Clinton by 1.2% and over 100,000 votes. Stats below.
With Joe Biden holding a steady 4% edge in the Real Clear Politics polling, I would’ve expected this to translate into a decided additional edge in members of the Democratic party. However, the opposite is the case.
While both parties have increased their overall numbers of registered voters, the Republican party have almost halved the Democratic advantage from 2016. The 2016 330,000 voter edge has been reduced to 183,000. As of August 31st 2020.
So while the Florida polls favor Biden, the facts on the ground most definitely lean towards Trump. In this election and this year of years, I’ll take facts over polls. Signal over Noise.
And a fired-up game day base chomping at the bit to vote.
Tomorrow: Ohio
All data for this article was sourced from the Florida Department of State.
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