Florida Voter File – Churn

by Alex Patton | Jan 23, 2020 | Political Research

Some weekend projects start with a simple question, this past weekend was no different.

“How much churn is there in Florida’s voter file?”

We wanted to get a sense of how much churn was in the voter file leading up to the 2020 election. We took the voterfile from Jan 2019 and compared it to the voterfile in December of 2019. (We went county by county using the R library CRAN compareDF) For the period of 2019, we wanted to explore how many records changed, how many were added, and how many were removed.

In the aggregate, it would appear there isn’t much churn or turnover in the voterfile. The number of registered voters grew about 2% for the year. However, that masks the story.

On average, 7% of the voters had changes in their data (this can be anything from switching parties, address changes, having the precinct number change, etc), 7% were additions, and 5% were removed during that time.

In 2020, Florida added 979,146 voters and removed 741,312 voters.

But my take away is this – remember there are differences in macro- behavior and micro-behavior – and macro level changes maybe masking much larger micro-shifts.

Below are the county breakdowns, some of the counties that exhibit high percentages of change were shifting / changing precinct numbers.

[table id=13 /]

Florida GOP is Winning the Voter Registration Battle

by Ben Torpey | Aug 5, 2019 | Political Research

Statewide elections in Florida are among the most competitive and hotly contested elections in the United States. Since 2012, six statewide elections have been decided by less than 1.2% while three have been won by fewer than 35,000 votes. Once you realize there are 13 million registered voters in Florida, these results are jarring.

Florida Democrats are Losing the Registration Game

Since 2012, only one Democrat (Nikki Fried) has won a statewide election in Florida – a result decided by just 6,500 votes. Clearly, Florida Democrats have a ‘winning’ problem.

In the age of Trump, politicos anticipated a better performance by Florida Democrats in 2016 and then again in 2018 amid the supposed “blue wave.” Rather than riding the blue wave, Florida voters fought the current and elected a Trump-endorsed Republican governor and fired an 18-year incumbent Democratic Senator. Why? How?

Florida GOP is Closing the Registration Gap

Many reasons could explain the poor performance by Florida Democrats but one major data point stands out – voter registration. As of late, Republicans have been beating Democrats at their own game. Plain and simple. 

Although the Republican Party is currently home to one of the most unfavorable presidents in American history, Florida Democrats hold the smallest lead over Republicans in voter party registration since Florida began recording the statistic in 1972.

Compare that to just ten years ago when Florida Democrats had a 700,000 registration lead over Republicans, setting the stage for Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008. Since then, Republicans shaved the Democratic lead down to just 250,000 – a reduction of roughly 450,000 registered voters.

Can Florida Turn Blue in 2020?

Anything is possible. But fifteen months from election day, Republican registration is on track for a Trump victory in Florida. Bar a Trump campaign catastrophe, an economic collapse, or Joe Biden forgetting that he is running for president – again, anything is possible – historical election data reveals that Democrats need a 500,000 lead in voter registration for a solid chance at winning Florida in 2020.

Unfortunately for Republicans, it is not unprecedented for Democrats to grow their registration lead in the year leading up to a presidential election (see graph from 2007-2008). On top of that, Democrats identified the need to register Florida voters as evidenced by Andrew Gillum’s plan to register 1 million voters before the 2020 election. All Gillum has to do is follow through and turn down Hamilton tickets.

Only time will tell if Florida Democrats rise to the occasion.

I will check in with updates as we countdown to election day 2020.

Quick Question: Is there a correlation between primary turnout and general election turnout in Florida?

by Alex Patton | Aug 22, 2018 | Political Research

Great question via twitter this morning – is there a correlation between primary election turnout and general election turnout?

My first guess was “no, it is more a function of competitive races on the ballot, and historically one party will have incumbency.”

BUT – let’s goto the data for a quick explore.

Lucky for us, Florida has a historical archive.

https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/data-statistics/elections-data/voter-turnout/

I cleaned it up a little and added a binary variable to explore POTUS v midterms.

flturnout (excel sheet)

The relationship between primary turnout and general election turnout in Florida Elections (1954-2016)

POTUS ONLY YEARS

MIDTERMS ONLY YEARS

Conclusion

There is no measurable relationship between the two variables; need to explore other potential variables that may predict general election turnout better – such as the number of competitive races.

2014 Florida Governors Race Results by DMA

by Alex Patton | Apr 18, 2017 | Political Research

Thinking about 2018 with a potential matchup of Rick Scott v Senator Bill Nelson, I was messing around with scripts to combine data sets and came up with vote totals for the 2014 campaign for Florida Governor featuring Rick Scott v Charlie Crist by Florida DMA (Television Markets).

Here you go…..I may write later on what this possibly means for 2018, but for now, it is provided as is for your enjoyment.

How divided is Florida?

by Alex Patton | Apr 1, 2017 | Political Research

I went to bed last night thinking about about DecisionDeskHQ’s attempt to make a nationwide precinct map.  It is a challenging and cool project.

Thinking about this as I slumbered, I awoke wondering just ‘how divided are we in Florida at the precinct level’?  

Thanks to the great state of Florida, we have precinct level results, and over morning coffee, I found my answer.

The answer:  Pretty damn divided.  

If you consider a precinct “competitive” if separated by 10% or less, then few Floridians live in precincts that are competitive – the median difference in the 2016 POTUS election is 28% in Florida.    

Only 18% of Florida’s precincts had Clinton and Trump within 10% of each other.

OR

Almost half (46%) of Florida’s precincts resulted in the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being greater than or equal to 30%.

P.S.  The data is below, and now you know what nerds do on Saturday mornings before their kids wake up.

DATA

This is a histogram of the absolute value of the difference between the Clinton% and Trump% of the vote total.

Note:  (I dropped the random precincts that are less than .01 and greater than .99)

Here are the summary statistics:

Precinct by category

Sum of Votes cast by Precinct Category

You can download my cleaned data at: gitHub or at data.world.

TV DMAs by County

by Alex Patton | Feb 11, 2017 | Political Research

I was looking for a data-set this morning for a GIS project, and I thought the data would be relatively easy to find.  It wasn’t.

I did find what I wanted in one case, but someone was charging $199 for the data.

So, I spent a couple of hours researching, compiling and cleaning data.

I offer it to you for free and in the name of political analysis.  Enjoy!

Data Set: TV DMAs by Counties – USA.