More non-primary voters mail in ballots this time

The political team at the Florida Chamber of Commerce has come across a remarkable trend this campaign season: A huge spike in mail voting by people who rarely vote in primary elections.

Almost half of the mail ballots returned so far for Tuesday’s primary election have come from Floridians who voted in either one or zero of the last four primary elections in Florida.

That means a big, decisive chunk of the vote will come from Floridians who have not been polled, and potentially not courted, targeted or accounted for by countless campaigns across the state.

“This is huge,” said Marian Johnson, Senior Vice President of Political Strategy for the Florida Chamber and one of the foremost experts on Florida campaigns and politics. “I can envision election night when the votes are counted that certain people win that nobody thought had a chance, and that being attributed to this trend.”

As of Thursday, more than 855,000 primary ballots had been cast by mail.

More than a quarter of those votes came from Floridians who had not voted in any of the last four primaries — and another 20 percent from people who had voted in just one of the last four primaries.

In other words, these are not “likely voters” surveyed by most pollsters or targeted by sophisticated political campaigns. The trend applies to Democrats and Republicans alike and across the state, said Johnson, who was shocked when she first spotted the trend developing weeks ago.

“The first thing I did was go back to my data people and said, “Are you sure you ran this right?’ ” Johnson said.

They had. The data crunchers looked at who requested mail ballots and who is returning them, and categorize each voter by a zero, one, two, three or four — depending on how many of the last four primaries they voted in.

The Republican-leaning Chamber started targeting infrequent primary voters recently.