Florida and Ohio, the two biggest winner-take-all prizes on the presidential primary calendar in March, aren’t waiting until next month to vote. They’re voting now — and with potentially profound consequences for the 2016 campaign.

Struggling to survive until their home states’ votes are tallied March 15, Ohio’s John Kasich and Floridians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are racing to bank tens of thousands of early ballots that are increasingly being cast well before primary day.


“With about half the vote in by Election Day, we’re treating Feb. 15 to March 15 as one long Election Day in Florida,” said Rubio’s deputy campaign manager, Rich Beeson, who oversaw Mitt Romney’s 2012 ground game as political director.

In Florida, nearly 850,000 Republican absentee ballots have so far been requested. Almost 43,000 Floridians have already voted, roughly 25,000 of them Republicans.

Rich Heffley, a top Tallahassee GOP operative who played a major role in John McCain’s big Florida win in 2008 and is now running Bush’s early-vote efforts in the state, said the absentee program is a “critical part of our strategy.”

These early get-out-the-vote operations are the hidden, often critical, mechanics of modern campaigning. In Florida, a sophisticated absentee turnout program — assembling demographic profiles of a candidate’s voters and then contacting them via mail, phone or in-person visits to persuade them to request or then cast their ballot — can cost $1.5 million more.

It’s a complex endeavor requiring a deep understanding of the electorate — and deep pockets to fund voter contact. "There are two people in this campaign with the knowledge and experience to do that,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican strategist who once worked for Bush and has advised a pro-Rubio super PAC in 2016. “That’s Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.”

While Rubio has Beeson and Bush has Heffley (Bush’s super PAC has former Florida Republican Party executive director David Johnson too), the other campaigns haven’t advertised anyone in charge of pursuing absentee ballots in Florida. That’s true in the Democratic race as well, where neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders have Florida consultants banking vote-by-mail ballots.

As Bush and Rubio are busy working the absentee system to carve up Florida’s 99 delegates the main beneficiary of their in-state rivalry might be Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, who continue to outpoll the rest of the field.

But in Ohio, the dynamics could benefit Kasich. Polling stations there open for early in-person voting on Wednesday and Kasich appears to have the state all to himself to collect early ballots and get a jump on Ohio’s 66 delegates.

“We don’t have the same kind of headache Rubio and Bush have in Florida,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, of Florida's home-state fissure.

Kasich has another built-in advantage: The Ohio Republican Party is all-in for the governor. The party is paying for a pro-Kasich mailer sent to every Ohio voter who requests an absentee ballot.

“We chase absentee requests with an endorsed Republican slate card,” said Borges, who predicted about one-third of the Ohio vote will be cast before March 15.

In Florida and beyond, Bush is getting on-the-ground help from Right to Rise, his super PAC, which is sending mailers to frequent absentee voters. "This is a long and expensive process and early voting makes it even harder for candidates with limited resources to compete,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the Bush super PAC. "Some candidates will have a hard time living hand to mouth with a condensed calendar and multiple states voting at the same time."

The Rubio-backing Conservative Solutions super PAC is doing no similar work.

The Rubio-Bush match isn’t just a home state fight. It’s neighbor vs. neighbor. They live a five-minute drive apart, the senator in West Miami and the former governor in Coral Gables. So they threaten also to divide up each other’s home-town votes in Miami-Dade, the most-populous county in the state, where Cuban-American Republicans tend to heavily vote by absentee ballot.

Four years ago, the Romney campaign made a strong play for absentee voters in Florida and laid the ground work to blow away rival Newt Gingrich just as he was besting the former Massachusetts governor in South Carolina. The Florida loss precipitated Gingrich’s collapse.

Dan Centinello, Romney’s deputy national political director, said the Romney campaign would “do daily requests in order to obtain the list of all the people who have already voted” early and then “run very thorough voter identification projects on it.”

“This allowed us to know what the current ‘score’ was with a great deal of confidence. It would also allow us to know what our vote goal was on the actual Election Day,” he said.

He called it their “crystal ball” and said it was often more informative than the public polls that get so much media coverage. “In a time where everyone is constantly examining the latest polls, the campaigns are likely far more focused on what the early voting is telling them,” Centinello said.

“The only ones peering into this crystal ball more closely than the campaign staff will be the candidates themselves,” Centinello said.

Early voting can give the most sophisticated and best-funded campaigns an edge, as they can target their voters as roughly two-dozen states open balloting in the coming weeks.

“You can ID early voters,” said Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Ted Cruz. “You know who they are and campaigns, depending on how much money they have — and we have a lot — it’s just common sense to get to [early voters] earlier than you do everyone else.”

Trump, who's not running a traditional campaign, hasn't hired an absentee-ballot guru -- a sign of the confidence of his campaign in his standing in the polls and the survey data showing that Rubio and Bush are cannibalizing one another's voters to Trump's benefit.

In the fluid 2016 presidential primary, many voters are expected to delay casting their ballots (“sit on it” in consultant-speak) so as not to “waste” their vote. The South Carolina primary, debates and March 1 Southeastern states – which all lean heavily Trump and then Cruz – could play a far-larger role on the decisions of Florida and Ohio voters than any mailer, phone call or TV ad.

But for the almost 43,000 voters in Florida, the decision is already clear. They’ve cast their ballots. But for whom? The votes won’t be counted until March 15, and the speculation rages. Because exit polls in New Hampshire and Iowa indicated that Trump was strongly supported by early deciders, there’s a sense among some that he might be winning them in Florida – especially because polls in the state he calls a second home show him with a big lead.

Cruz came in second in January polls, although Rubio moved from third to second in a more-recent survey from Florida Southern College. Bush remains mired in fourth in most surveys.

“If anybody thinks that because they’re quote-unquote native sons, that’s impacting their ballot position in Florida, there’s no data to suggest that,” said one unaligned Florida Republican strategist. “There is no home-state advantage for either one of these guys as it is today.”