(In each graph, the X-Axis is a precinct’s Election Day or Vote-By-Mail or Early In-Person votes cast out of total votes cast in that precinct by all three methods. The Y-Axis is Trump’s and Clinton’s share of total votes cast out of votes for all presidential candidates for each of the three methods.)
In his detailed article today, New York Times Upshot’s Nate Cohn asks the following:
“Is it possible that the registered Democrats who turned out were Trump supporters, and that the Democrats who stayed home were likelier to be supporters of Mrs. Clinton? Perhaps, but our polling suggests the opposite. In our pre-election Upshot/Siena polls, voters were likelier than nonvoters to support their party’s nominee.”
My preliminary analysis from Florida suggests otherwise. Along with my UF Election Sciences team, we painstakingly collected precinct-level election results for Trump and Clinton by method of voting (early in-person, vote-by-mail, and Election Day) from the nearly 6,000 precincts in Florida’s 67 counties, parsed them and cleaned them up, and then merged the presidential results with precinct information gleaned from the Florida voter file. Since we know which method of voting Florida voters used to cast their ballots, we’re able to make lots of different kinds of precise estimates. One goes to the heart of Nate’s question, at least for Florida.
The plot below shows the proportion of total votes cast on Election Day by White Democrats in each precinct, and the vote share for Trump and Clinton won on Election Day. The horizontal (X-axis) reveals that the range of White Democratic Election Day voters making up a precinct’s total Election Day votes ranges from 0% (e.g., heavily Republican, or Hispanic and Black precincts) to a handful that top 40%.
The precinct dots (weighted by Election Day turnout) and the accompanying lowess fit lines suggest a telling pattern: Trump generally won a greater share of the Election Day vote in precincts where the share of White Democrats exceeded 5% of the total Election Day votes cast on Election day. The greater the share of White Democratic Election Day voters, the greater Trump’s share of the vote.
(This is the identical plot, just with Trump’s precinct vote share overlaying Clinton’s precinct vote share.)
Interestingly, the pattern doesn’t exist for either Early In-Person or Vote-by-Mail votes cast in a precinct by White Democrats (see below), suggesting that some 11th hour surprise (hmmm, I wonder what that could have been, James Comey?), may have influenced the vote choice of White Democrats who waited until Election Day to cast their ballots.
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.
Reprecincting and Voting Behavior
Brian Amos, Daniel A. Smith, and Casey Ste. Claire
University of Florida
Here’s a link to the on-line version.
ElectionSmith 
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