Florida Republicans voting by mail at higher clip than Democrats ahead of early voting

As Florida prepares for early voting to begin on Monday, vote-by-mail turnout so far indicates a higher ballot return rate for Republicans, though more Democrats have requested absentee ballots.

More than 1 million Floridians had voted by mail as of Friday afternoon, according to the Florida Division of Elections. That’s just shy of a quarter of the roughly 4.2 million voters who asked for ballots to be delivered through the postal service.

Nearly 29% of Republicans who requested to vote-by-mail in the upcoming general election have returned their ballots, compared to about 24% of Democrats, according to data tracked by the state.

While those mail ballot numbers could indicate more enthusiasm among Republicans, it’s still too soon to draw conclusions about overall turnout in the Nov. 8 election, said Michael McDonald, political science professor and voter turnout researcher at the University of Florida.

“It’s a little too early to say with definitiveness that Republicans are more energized, more active in terms of returning their ballots, but it could be,’‘ McDonald said, especially as voting by mail has become a partisan issue following the 2020 election.

Partisan split

Voting by mail has become an increasingly divisive political issue amid unsubstantiated concerns raised by some Republicans that mail-in ballots led to election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

An October poll by Siena and The New York Times showed that a majority of Republican respondents — about 55% — consider voting by mail to be a major threat to democracy, compared to only 12% of Democrats and 31% of independents.

“The Republicans who have mail-in ballot requests at this point are those that really want to vote by mail,” McDonald said. “They didn’t cancel their mail ballot request in 2020 because of the rhetoric that was coming from Donald Trump.”

While the number of ballots requested by Republicans remains relatively consistent with that of 2018, about 450,000 more Democrats received mail-in ballots compared to the previous midterm election.

Over 37% of registered Democrats requested an absentee ballot in 2022, up from 28% in 2018.

Mail-in ballot requests for both Republicans and Democrats were higher in 2020, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Mark Ard, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of State.

“What the challenge is going to be for the Democratic Party will be chasing down those people who have those mail-in ballots and encouraging them to return [them],” McDonald said.

Last year, the Florida Democratic Party launched Blue Shift, a statewide coordinated campaign geared toward midterm elections, Ferguson Yacyshyn, director of the coordinated campaign, wrote in an email.

“Right now Blue Shift is in full swing,” Yacyshyn wrote. “We have 2,000 volunteers knocking doors and making phone calls and we’re sending over 100,000 text messages a day focused on chasing VBM ballots. We’re also running a layered canvass operation targeting Hispanic and African American communities across the state.”

Mail-in ballot requests among No-Party-Affiliated voters have also increased by about 200,000 compared to 2018, which is consistent with a general rise in voters registering as independents.

That could bode well for Democrats, according to McDonald.

“You get a lot of young people who aren’t registered with a political party. And we know that they tend to behave more like Democrats that are going to support Democrats more often than not,” McDonald said.

So far, only about 22% of independent voters who requested a mail-in ballot have returned them. In 2018, nearly 71% of voters with no party affiliation returned their mail-in ballots, a slightly smaller share than the 74% of Democrats who returned their mail-in ballots.

In 2018, a greater number of Republicans voted-by-mail than Democrats, while Democrats edged out Republicans in ballots cast during early voting. All told, about 30,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted early or by mail in that election.

The edge in pre-election day voting didn’t translate into victories in the biggest statewide contests, however, as Republican Ron DeSantis won the race for the Governor’s mansion, while Republican Rick Scott ousted incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson for the U.S. Senate.

Now, the number of registered Republicans in Florida exceeds the number of Democrats in the state for the first time after the GOP surpassed Democrats late last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by the Herald.