According to the Florida Division of Elections, some 9.58m Floridians turned out to vote in the 2016 General Election, or 74.5% of the “Active” registered voters at the time of the state’s October bookclosing.
After some routine parsing and cleaning (more on that later), I’ve crunched the numbers from the January 10, 2017 statewide voter file and vote history files.
According to these records, some 9.592m registered voters (active & inactive) cast ballots in the 2016 General Election, or 69.98% of the state’s 13.7m registered voters. When limiting votes cast to just those who are considered “Active” by the counties, the total votes cast drops to 9.590m, indicating that nearly 2,600 “inactive” voters cast ballots. (The plurality of these “inactive” voters, incidentally, were Democrats.)
As for turnout among party registrants (limiting the following analysis to “active” voters), 74.4% of the state’s 4.908m Democrats turned out to vote. In contrast, 81.2% of the state’s 4.577m registered Republicans cast ballots. Only 63.3% of the state’s 3.132m No Party Affiliates (NPAs) voted, whereas 70.2% of the 347k Third Party registrants turned out.
With respect to turnout by race/ethnicity, 77.1% of the state’s 8.302m white voters voted. That’s considerably higher than the 68.9% turnout rate of the state’s 2.055m registered Hispanics and the 69.0% turnout rate of the state’s 1.743m registered blacks.
What about race/ethnicity by party?
Among Democrats, 77.5% of the 2.39m white Democrats voted; 70.9% of the 812k Hispanic Democrats voted; and 72.1% of the 1.41m black Democrats voted.
Among Republicans, 82.6% of the 3.814m white Republicans voted; 75.4% of the 519k Hispanic Republicans voted; and 61.2% of the 61.3k black Republicans voted.
Among NPAs, 66.0% of the 1.819m white NPAs voted; 61.9% of the 693k Hispanic NPAs voted; and 54.1% of the 255k black NPAs voted.
In previous posts, I’ve documented extensively the early in-person and vote-by-mail turnout rates by party and race, but until now, we haven’t been able to delve into Election Day turnout. I’m working on a couple of academic papers on this topic, so I’m not going to go into details here.
But here’s the kicker:
Of the roughly 2.959m voters who cast ballots on Election Day, 39.5% of ballots cast were by Republicans. Only 34.2% of ballots cast on Election Day were by Democrats. Another 23.4% of Election Day ballots were cast by NPAs, and 2.9% were cast by Third Party registrants.
Say what you will about the many developments in the waning days of the campaign that likely hurt Clinton, her ground game in Florida apparently failed to deliver, as nearly 1.3m active Democrats stayed home.
ElectionSmith 