In just 12 hours of in-person early voting Saturday, Florida Democrats swamped the polls so heavily that they ran up a more than 34,000-vote margin over Republicans out of the nearly 270,000 votes that were reported to have been cast at polling stations. (Pardon the strange verb tense in the last sentence, but large-county Duval, which has 239,000 Democrats, hasn’t yet reported its data).**
The Democratic vote was so big that it cut a Republican lead, built up during a month’s worth of absentee-ballot voting, by more than half. As of Saturday morning, Republicans were ahead of Democrats by nearly 66,000 absentee ballots cast, or 5 percentage points.
Factor in the day’s worth of Democratic early voting, and that GOP lead is now just above 31,000, or 2 points. Add in Duval, whenever those numbers come in, and the GOP lead should be even smaller.
Here are the absentee and early vote ballots combined:
| Party | Total votes | Total % |
| REP | 674,025 | 43% |
| DEM | 642,660 | 41% |
| IND | 258,610 | 16% |
| Total | 1,575,295 |
The early vote numbers:
Click here for the story in the Miami Herald
