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-by-mail 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 get-out-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.