Reading the tea leaves of voter turnout
What do primary numbers portend for November?
On her way to vote in Tuesday’s primary elections, Bernice Adams, 79, thought the mood at North Dade Regional Library was mellow. Too mellow, she thought, for the usual rowdy scene at the Miami Gardens polling site, one of Miami-Dade County’s largest.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing,” said Adams, who has lived in Miami Gardens for more than four decades. It was concerning, she said, because Miami Gardens City Council had three races that could potentially be decided on Tuesday.
(All of them were.)
“A lot of people wait until November, but they don’t realize how important this is,” she griped.
Preliminary turnout results in Tuesday’s primary suggest the turnout was indeed slightly lower than it was in 2018. According to Florida’s Department of State figures — and with most counties done curing provisional ballots — the state had a 25.87% voter turnout. That’s slightly lower than 2018, when 27% of active registered voters cast a ballot.
The difference is that, in 2018, both parties had statewide primary races for the gubernatorial election. Still, an early look at voter turnout in Tuesday’s primary suggests that Republicans could be edging out Democrats in Florida not only in registration but also in turnout.
To Adams’ point, turnout is particularly important in local races during a primary because the margin of victory can be so thin. In 2018, with several contested races in the general election for governor, U.S. Senate and Congress, voter turnout was 63%, more than twice the number of people who showed up to vote in the primary two months prior. It was an unusually high participation rate, nearly 13 percentage points higher than the average turnout rate in the 10 years prior.
This year, with Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist battling for the governor’s seat, and U.S. Rep. Val Demings vying to upset incumbent U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, races on the ballot are likely to generate a lot of high interest at the local level.
A preliminary Herald analysis shows that Republicans had significantly higher turnout in the most Republican counties compared to Democrats in the counties where they dominate, despite Republicans not having had any major statewide primary races on the ballot.
Florida counties with a higher share of Republican voters — which are concentrated north of Orlando — have significantly smaller populations than Democratic-majority counties. But while Broward and Orange counties are very populous and have a larger share of Democratic voters, Democratic turnout there did not even reach 30%.
In Miami-Dade County, which still leans Democratic despite the party losing more than 3.5% of its registered voters since 2018, Democrats slightly underperformed Republicans in turnout, according to preliminary county elections data.
NUMBERS DON’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY
That analysis, however, doesn’t account for voters who aren’t affiliated with any political party, a growing segment of the population that cannot vote in partisan primary races because Florida has a closed primary system. It also doesn’t capture county-level elections that may have driven voters in a particular race. For example, in Miami-Dade County, School Board elections had a much higher turnout rate than in 2018, when about 25,000 people voted in them.
This time, an average of 30,000 votes were cast in the local School Board elections. Although they are nonpartisan races, many GOP voters were likely driven to the polls after DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez weighed in with endorsements and local campaign events.
The early numbers prompted some Florida Republicans to argue it’s an early sign that there’s a gap in enthusiasm from Democratic voters and suggest Republicans may have even wider victory margins in November.
“Republicans had a 5.1% advantage in the partisan makeup of the electorate last night in Florida,” Ryan Tyson, a Republican pollster and operative, tweeted on Wednesday. “There was no statewide race to drive turnout on the right. Just patriots ready to go donkey hunting this fall.”
But Florida elections data experts say the primary numbers don’t help tell a complete picture of voter enthusiasm for either party. For one thing, they argue, people who show up for midterm primary elections are mostly high propensity and high frequency voters.
“I don’t put a lot of weight into primary elections,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who studies voter turnout. He said that the biggest problem with drawing conclusions about primary election turnout results is that there’s no apples-to-apples comparison.
While in 2018 Republicans had a major race at the state level, a contested primary in which DeSantis was ultimately buoyed by an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, the only statewide contested primary that Republicans had on the ballot on Tuesday was the race for Commissioner of Agriculture.
“In order to draw any definitive conclusions, you need to make comparisons to a prior election,” McDonald
said. “I don’t think it tells us very much.”
THE PRIMARY VOTER TURNOUT CONUNDRUM
The question of a primary election turnout is also complicated by the fact that Republicans tend to turn out in higher numbers in elections with lower overall turnout because of the traditional demographics of the GOP, said Daniel Smith, political science professor at the University of Florida.
“Republican voters are older,” Smith said. “They’re going to turn out at a higher rate regardless of other issues.”
While overall turnout broken down by party affiliation at the state level is still incomplete, Smith said that turnout will give Democrats a view into how well their party is able to mobilize voters, particularly after the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion access that has energized Democrats running for office around the country.
“Given that there was one statewide Republican race on the ballot, Democrats in contrast had a
A primary turnout analysis doesn’t account for unaffiliated voters, because they can’t vote in primary races.
major marquee battle for governor, a vibrant [U.S.] Senate candidate who was looking for the nomination, they probably should’ve been able to pull as many votes as Republicans,” he said.
Smith did say he noticed other worrying signs for Democrats. For example, he said that while 15% of registered Democrats are under the age of 30, they were only 4% of combined early voting and mail ballots. Democrats have a larger share of young voters than Republicans, he said.
“Again, does that tell us everything about enthusiasm? Not necessarily, but it’s an indicator that young people don’t turn out in primary elections and whatever their frustrations were, we didn’t see that manifest,” Smith said.
Looking ahead to November, Smith said that in order for Democrats to remain competitive, they should focus on voters with no party affiliation and how they are thinking about issues like the economy, education and voting rights.
“We don’t know how NPAs are going to respond to those issues,” he said. “But Democrats need NPAs to turn out and to break for them to do well in Florida. And that’s not because Democrats are in a huge deficit in terms of voter registration ... but it’s because Republicans have a higher turnout.”
SOMETHING TO WATCH: DEMOCRATS AND MAIL BALLOT TRENDS
There is one trend that McDonald said was not getting enough attention at the state level and could say more about how turnout will look like in November. At the state level, he said Democrats have a massive advantage in vote-by-mail ballot requests.
This is significant, he said, because it means that Democrats are already going to have an easier time convincing voters to mail back their ballots. While Republicans historically held an advantage in mail ballot voting in Florida, McDonald said, those trends have begun to reverse since 2020.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats successfully convinced voters to choose voting by mail instead of going in person and risking illness. It coincided with Trump making unsubstantiated claims of imminent election fraud in 2020, which made many in his base distrust absentee ballots.
Because of Senate Bill 90, a controversial voting law that was passed by Florida’s Republican-led Legislature in response to Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 election results, mail ballot requests now last for only two years.
“This seems to be a change in behavior, and when SB 90 was passed, Republicans targeted this part of Florida’s law because they no longer had an advantage,” McDonald said.
McDonald said that mail ballots are more likely to stimulate voter participation.
“States that run all-mail ballot elections have higher turnout,” McDonald said, pointing to states like Oregon, Washington and Colorado. “That ballot is more likely to stimulate their participation.”
But McDonald warned against using that as a metric to draw conclusions about what the general election results could look like.
“How much of an advantage is it worth? It’s really hard to say because ... you really have to have a comparison point. And we really don’t have this,” he said. “The 2020 election was so unusual.”
Miami Herald staff writers C. Isaiah Smalls II and Ana Claudia Chacín and McClatchy Washington bureau reporter Ben Wieder contributed to this article.
Bianca Padró Ocasio: 305-376-2649, @BiancaJoanie