FL Dems beat GOP by 73,000 early votes by Monday, wipes out GOP absentee-vote lead. But....

In the first two days of in-person early voting, Florida Democrats wiped away a lead that Florida Republicans had run up thanks to the GOP's strong absentee-ballot program. In all, about 1.9 million ballots have been cast (about 16 percent of the 11.9 million voters)

As of this morning, Democrats cast a total of 73,000 more early in person ballots than Republicans, who had cast about 63,000 more absentee ballots, typically cast by mail. So it looks like a 10,000-vote edge for Democrats.

But it's probably smaller than that.

The Monday absentee ballot numbers aren't really updated because no mail is delivered Sunday. By averaging the daily percentage increases of the GOP absentee-vote lead, the total Democratic advantage could be as low as 2,000. Of course, it could be higher. This is just a projection.

Perhaps more troubling for Democrats is the trend: The second day of early voting appears to have been smaller than the first. On Saturday, about 300,000 people early voted. On Sunday, that number appears to have dropped to 215,000 -- a 28 percent decline from the day before.

Democratic votes declined 26 percent, Republican votes declined 29 percent while independent voters declined only 18 percent.

That suggests the first day of in-person early voting was so heavy because it was releasing pent-up demand, not because of some great ground game effort by President Obama. Also, yesterday was the only in-person early voting Sunday, when black churches hold their "Souls to the Polls" rallies.

The possible trendline is bad news for Obama because he's trailing in the polls -- including among independents. Assuming the polls are right, a consistently largescale Democratic turnout would counteract any loss of independent support. Also, the percentage lead of registered Democrats over Republicans is down from 5.8 percentage points to 4.5 percentage points in 2008. They still have a raw voter lead of about 536,000.

There are still six days of early voting left. The GOP-Legislature reduced the 14 days of early voting in 2008 to eight days this year. So the next few get-out-the-vote days are crucial for Obama, who was in Orlando today, and Romney, who's coming to Miami on Wednesday.

Early votes:

Party	Early Vote	%
DEM	251,110	49%
REP	177,958	35%
IND	84,121	16%
TOTAL	513,189

Absentee votes:

Party	AB votes	%
DEM	532,903	39%
REP	595,940	44%
IND	222,859	16%
TOTAL	1,351,702

Combined:

Party	EV+AB	%
DEM	784,013	42%
REP	773,898	41%
IND	306,980	16%
Total	1,864,891

**Note: "Independents" is shorthand for those independent of the Republican and Democratic Party; 89% of registered independents are officially No Party Affiliation voters. All figures here are compiled from state elections data, some of which doesn't exactly jibe with county-reported data, which changes hourly. Still, the margins of error are relatively small

Comments

[ers]

wait till election day, when people who are at the election site by 7 p.m. can vote and it takes till (9pm to finish voting...How may in-ept election officials will try to close the polls illegally...Florida won't be decided for days