Employees hang early voting signs in Florida. | AP Photo/Lynne Sladky Early ballots and voter-registration numbers show Democrats surging in Florida

MIAMI — Approximately 311,000 Floridians cast absentee ballots by Friday morning in the nation’s biggest battleground state, and the numbers are increasingly moving in favor of Democrats and their White House nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Compared to the day before and this point four years ago, Democrats are catching up to Republicans in the number of voted absentee ballots — a part of the election that the Florida GOP used to own. But now, Republicans are ahead of Democrats by just 1.9 percentage points (about 42-40 percent), compared with a 3 percent advantage held Thursday by the GOP and a 3.9-point Republican advantage at this point relative to Election Day in 2012, state elections data shows.


At the same time, since the 2012 presidential election, the Florida Democratic Party has blown away the Republican Party of Florida in submitting new voter-registration forms. Democrats have submitted 177,000 and Republicans fewer than 13,000 registration forms collected, according to an analysis of Florida Division of Elections data made by University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith. Smith also determined that the Florida Democratic Party has added about 42,000 more newly registered voters to its rolls than the GOP for the 2016 cycle as of Sept. 1, the most-recent date for which the data are available.

The numbers underscore how much stronger Clinton’s ground game is in Florida and how weak the Republican National Committee’s is on behalf of Donald Trump, longtime Florida political consultants say. If Trump loses Florida, he can’t win the White House. And polls already show that Clinton is starting to move farther ahead of the Republican in Florida.

Just two months ago, RNC spokesman Sean Spicer was claiming the opposite about the GOP’s strength when he wrote a memo that accused Democrats of “sleight of hand” in boasting about their superior number of field offices.

“The Clinton camp knows that the Trump campaign and the RNC’s combined efforts are outpacing their field organization, and their touting how many offices they have cannot cover up the fact they lag behind our effort in organizers, volunteers, and voter registration in key states,” Spicer wrote.

Longtime Florida Republican consultant Rick Wilson — a leading critic of Trump within the party — scoffed at Spicer’s memo in light of the voter-registration and absentee-ballot numbers.

“They’re lying sacks of shit,” Wilson said. “There is no real Republican ground game in Florida. There wasn’t then when he wrote this memo. And there really isn’t now.”

Wilson recalled how he had to tell reporters in 2012, on behalf of Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the state GOP, that it was no big deal that Democrats were catching up to Republicans in figuring out how to get more people to vote by mail. At the time, Wilson recalls, he was told to tell reporters that Democrats were merely “cannibalizing” their Election Day voters. But Democrats kept closing the margins four years ago. And, when the in-person early voting period opened, they overtook Republicans in absentee ballots cast.

In the end, the GOP didn’t have enough voters and Romney couldn’t peel away enough independents to win in the Sunshine State, which Obama carried by less than a percentage point, or 74,000 votes.

This year, Democrats appear on pace to match Republican ballots cast before the period of in-person early voting starts in select counties Oct. 24. Florida Democrats — thanks to African-American voters especially — typically cast more in-person early vote ballots than Republicans. Republicans used to dominate at absentee-ballot voting because they had superior organization and had conditioned their base to vote by mail. Absentee-ballot voting is one of the most efficient ways for a party or a campaign to bank votes from reliable voters in order to focus on turning out less reliable voters at the polls.

Combined, in-person early votes and absentee ballots will likely account for more than half of the votes — about 55 percent — before Election Day this year.

Though all the votes won’t be tallied and publicized until Election Day, political parties and consultants know that about nine out of 10 ballots cast by party go toward their nominee. They therefore use the pre-Election Day ballots as a real-time measurement for the health or weakness of their campaign or that of their opponent’s.

Due to Hurricane Matthew and a federal judge’s ruling, Florida’s voter-registration period has been extended by a week, until Tuesday. And third-party groups and Clinton’s campaign are making one final push to grow the rolls while the GOP appears stagnant.

As of Aug. 31, registered active Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 38-36 percent. Florida has about 12.5 million active voters. Republicans appeared to increase their numbers overall since 2012, but nearly all the GOP’s growth relative to the Democratic Party consisted of Republican-voting Democrats who finally decided to switch to the GOP, so it wasn’t much of a net loss, according to Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who studies Florida voter rolls.

The rolls aren’t just growing because of the Democratic and Republican parties. Hundreds of third-party groups are signing up voters. The big groups that are registering tens of thousands of people tend to sign up poor, young and minority voters — that is, those who disproportionately vote Democratic.

For instance, the National Council of La Raza has signed up 90,000 voters — 50 percent more than the state GOP for the past five years — and nearly all of those voters are young, recent-arrival or poor Hispanics, about 60 percent of whom will likely vote for Hillary Clinton, according to polls.

"Any way you square it, we are crushing them among new registrants,” said Max Steele, spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party.

“The Florida GOP and Trump campaign managed to get some headlines around the registration gap narrowing, but they lack the data operation to know that the folks switching from Democrat to the GOP have been voting Republican for years," he said. "We’ve prioritized voting by mail in an effort to close the gap with Republicans and we’re already seeing strong gains over our 2012 performance.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story used incorrect numbers posted by the Florida Division of Elections regarding voter-registration forms for the 2016 election cycle.