OK, there’s been a tremendous amount written on voter registration trends, by party, in Florida. It’s all wrong. Here’s why.

I’ve published quite a bit on the topic, served as an expert witness in dozens of successful lawsuits, and know these files inside and out.

Here are the facts, using proper voter files (i.e., contemporaneous), comparing Jan-July 2016 registration numbers with Jan-July 2020 voter registration numbers, comparing apples to apples.

To look at new registrations (that is, how the parties and groups are doing on the ground), you cannot merely use the Florida Division of Elections summary files to figure this out, as I explained four years ago, here.

OK, here are the numbers. Comparable voter registration, as of July 1, 2020, was down by a total of 136,392 registrants. And Democrats and Republicans both account for 32.1% of new registrants over the first six months of the year.

New Registrations by Party, January-June, 2016 vs. January-June 2020

	Dem	Rep	NPA	3rd	Total
Jan-June 2016	152,320	131,059	149,090	10,273	442,742
	34.4%	29.6%	33.7%	2.3%	100.0%
Jan-June 2020	98,439	98,472	99,879	9,560	306,350
	32.1%	32.1%	32.6%	3.1%	100.0%
Difference (2020-2016)	-53,881	-32,587	-49,211	-713	-136,392
	-2.3%	2.5%	-1.1%	0.8%

 

So, cut these numbers as you will, but by no means can it be said that Democrats are killing it out there.  In fact, a total of 33 more Republicans registered to vote anew between January 1 and June 30 (and remained registered as of June 30) than newly registered Democrats.

COVID-19 is obviously the major reason why Democratic numbers are down, as nonpartisan groups who usually hit the ground are not as active, SOEs who usually are in the schools preregistering young voters had no classrooms to go to in April or May, etc.  We’ve seen this pattern before, in 2011, after the Republican legislature passed HB 1355, which, among other things, cracked down on voter registration efforts by 3PVROs, as Michael Herron and I have written about before.

Perhaps Democrats and their allies will turn it around before the October registration date. Young voters who register immediately before an election in Florida are more likely to turn out in that proximate election, as Enrijeta Shino and I find, but their turnout levels aren’t sustained in subsequent elections, casting some doubt on the habitualization of voting.

But until we get some book closing numbers, the data are what they are. Republicans, as a proportion of new registrants in Florida, are doing better than they did four years ago over the first six months of the presidential election year.

An ElectionSmith Exclusive: Nearly 200k Floridians have already cast ballots in Florida’s Presidential Preference Primary. Twice as many votes cast by

Republicans than by Democrats.

As of Valentine’s Day, 66k Democrats and 122k Republicans had mailed in their Vote-by-Mail ballots ahead of Florida’s March 17th presidential preference primary.

Stay tuned for more updates…

Exclusive first cut at 2016 Turnout rates in Florida…by Party and Race/Ethnicity

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.

MI Republicans adopt strict Voter ID bills in lame-duck session. Wonder if electoral competition is tight…

William D. Hicks, Seth C. McKee, and Daniel A. Smith, “The Determinants of State Legislator Support for Restrictive Voter ID Laws,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 16:4 (December): 411-31.

 

Abstract

We examine state legislator behavior on restrictive voter identification (ID) bills from 2005 to 2013. Partisan polarization of state lawmakers on voter ID laws is well known, but we know very little with respect to other determinants driving this political division. A major shortcoming of extant research evaluating the passage of voter ID bills stems from using the state legislature as the unit of analysis. We depart from existing scholarship by using the state legislator as our unit of analysis, and we cover the entirety of the period when restrictive voter ID laws became a frequent agenda item in state legislatures. Beyond the obviously significant effect of party affiliation, we find a notable relationship between the racial composition of a member’s district, region, and electoral competition and the likelihood that a state lawmaker supports a voter ID bill. Democratic lawmakers representing substantial black district populations are more opposed to restrictive voter ID laws, whereas Republican legislators with substantial black district populations are more supportive. We also find Southern lawmakers (particularly Democrats) are more opposed to restrictive voter ID legislation. In particular, we find black legislators in the South are the least supportive of restrictive voter ID bills, which is likely tied to the historical context associated with state laws restricting electoral participation. Finally, in those state legislatures where electoral competition is not intense, polarization over voter ID laws is less stark, which likely reflects the expectation that the reform will have little bearing on the outcome of state legislative contests.

 

Full article available here:

On Cannibalizing the Vote in Florida…Here’s some data, @NateSilver538 @Nate_Cohn to work into your models

Working on fumes, so this will be quick.

One day (“Souls to the Poll”) of Early-in-Person voting still to tabulate, and thousands more Vote-by-Mail ballots still to make it to election offices by 7pm on Tuesday, but we’re headed for record turnout in Florida.

Over 6.1m votes already cast, rapidly approaching the 8.5m tallied in 2012.

So, with Election Day voting still to come, the Big Q is , which party has cannibalized voters who waited 4 years ago, until Tuesday, November 6, 2012 to vote, by getting them to vote early in 2016?

Let’s start with the parties first:

So far, of the 2.43m Democrats who’ve voted early, 76% voted in 2012.  This includes slightly more than 1/2 million Dems who in 2012 waited until Election Day to cast their ballots.

Of the 2.40m Republicans who’ve cast their lot through this am, 79% voted in 2012, including 558k who voted on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012.

Of the 1.16m No Party Affiliates who’ve already voted in the Sunshine State, only 60% voted in 2016, but the plurality of the 2012 voters cast their ballots on Election Day.

So, Republicans are cannibalizing their 2012 likely voters at a slightly higher rate than Democrats, and both parties are drawing in their likely voters at a much higher clip than NPAs.

Flipped upside down, this means that NPAs who stayed home in 2012 are coming out a a much higher rate than the partisans.

None of this surprises me.

What is notable is that nearly 1/4 Republicans who have already cast their mail or in-person ballots in 2016 waited to vote on Election Day in 2012, whereas it’s only slightly more than 1/5 Dems and NPAs who voted on Election Day in 2012 who have already voted. That means there are more votes (raw and percentage) to be had by Clinton than Trump as the final GOTV push occurs on Tuesday.

I don’t feel like writing up the Race/Ethnicity & Age & Gender cannibalization rates right now, but suffice to say, they ain’t pretty for The Donald.

As a tease, I’ll leave you with this tidbit: So far, 36% of the 907k Hispanics who have voted in 2016 didn’t vote by any method in 2012. That’s a full 12 points higher than whites, and will likely be the key to who wins the presidency.