Vote by mail enrollment passes 1 million for Florida Democrats

With President Donald Trump continuing his attacks on voting by mail — tweeting last week just before his visit to Miami that voting by mail is a “formula for RIGGING an Election” — a new CBS poll and data from the Florida Division of Elections indicate fewer Republicans than Democrats in the president’s home state are planning to cast their ballots from home.

The state elections office data shows Democrats with a more than 400,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment in the state. At the same time, a CBS News Battleground Tracker poll published on Sunday reveals a partisan divide over support for voting by mail, with just a quarter of likely Trump voters saying they prefer to vote by mail in 2020, compared to 59% of likely Joe Biden voters.

This shows that the novel coronavirus may be fast-forwarding a trend that was already under way in Florida before the pandemic began. Republicans, who had all but perfected the art of sending in mail votes after the state created no-excuse mail voting in 2002, are increasingly shifting back toward Election

Day voting.

Meanwhile, Democrats, who traditionally have dominated early voting in Florida — voting in person at election centers before Election Day — are focusing on vote-by-mail, which they believe will give them an advantage this fall amid expectations that the pandemic will continue to be a problem.

Heading into the August primary in 2016, more than 1 million Republican voters had requested mail ballots, compared to about 880,000 Democrats. As of Monday, Democrat vote-bymail requests outnumbered Republican requests by about 1.6 million to 1.2 million.

“The more people that move to vote-by-mail is a good thing. Not knowing what the world’s going to look like in November, it’s an absolutely significant advantage,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who now works with a Super PAC for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Biden.

The Florida Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee launched a campaign in March to encourage voters to fill out requests for vote-by-mail ballots as part of a retooled getout-the-vote effort after the March 17 presidential preference primary, which came just as the pandemic was striking Florida. Florida Democrats have made more than 3.8 million phone calls, texted 4.1 million voters and completed 19,404 volunteer shifts to increase vote-by-mail enrollment, according to a press release Monday.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty for voters because nobody should be in the position of choosing between their safety or voting,” said Luisana Pérez Fernández, the deputy communications director and Hispanic media director for Florida Democrats. “For us, it’s how can we make this process easy for our Democrats and for the voters in general.”

More than 1 million Democrats have requested or renewed their vote-by-mail ballots since the presidential primary, according to the Florida Democratic Party. Fernández said the party will continue making phone calls and sending text messages to ask voters to switch to vote-by-mail ballots up until the election.

Republicans say they’re not worried.

“Florida Democrats notoriously cannibalize their own votes, and on Election Day the results are always the same: they lose,” Florida Press Secretary for the Republican National Committee

Emma Vaughn wrote in a statement.

The Trump campaign is still encouraging mail voting in Florida by encouraging voters to sign up for “absentee ballots” as the president argues that mail voting shouldn’t be widespread but made available to people who can’t physically vote in person. The Republican Party of Florida has also said it will continue to promote mail voting.

But Republicans are staffing up in Florida, too. The Republican National Committee and

Trump’s campaign announced on Monday the hiring of 300 additional field staffers that will work in 20 target states, bringing the total number of field staffers to 1,500. “Our permanent, datadriven ground game never left Florida after the 2016 election,” Vaughn wrote.

Voting by mail has grown in popularity since 2002 and it now accounts for about a third of the vote cast statewide. Republicans have relied on voting by mail in the past, but they have since started to steer away from the practice. During the March primary, about 12,000 more votes were cast through mail ballots for Democrats than for Republicans, compared to 2016, when Republicans cast about 60,000 more mail ballots for Trump than

Democrats did for former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

While Trump’s attacks on the integrity of mail voting may explain why the number of requests for mail-in ballots are down among some Republicans in Florida, that doesn’t necessarily mean GOP turnout will be low. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll from June, almost two-thirds of Republicans nationwide said they’d vote in person at the polls in November, compared to less than one-third of Democrats.

Christina White, the supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade, said that despite the increase in the number of mail-in-ballots being requested, the county elections department will offer the same level of early voting and Election Day precincts as they have in the past.

“Even though we are anticipating a large number of people to vote by mail, because frankly, you never know,” White said. “If conditions change over the next month going into the primary or even more so going into November, voters may change their mind and they’re entitled to do that.”

Of course, not all voters who request a mail-in-ballot will return it, and in 2016 and 2018 more Republicans returned a ballot that they requested than Democrats did.

But in a state that will give the winner 29 electoral votes — one that Trump just narrowly won in 2016 — even a small margin may make a difference in the final outcome. “It’s always a good idea to be in a place where you can bank votes,” Schale said.