People vote at a polling station on the first day of early voting in Miami-Dade County for the general election Oct. 24. | AP Photo/Lynne Sladky Florida Democrats hold 90,000 early vote lead, but will it carry Clinton to White House?

MIAMI — Election Day dawned in the nation’s biggest battleground state with Florida Democrats out-voting Republicans by about 90,000 early ballots cast before the polls opened Tuesday — a potentially big, but not insurmountable lead, that could help Hillary Clinton win the White House.

On a percentage basis, the Democratic advantage over Republicans was small as of Tuesday morning — 1.4 percentage points of the 6.5 million in-person early and mail-in absentee ballots.


Though the votes won’t be tallied until Tuesday night, party registration strongly correlates with support for the top-of-the-ticket candidates. So the early vote totals help gauge the relative campaign strengths of Clinton and Donald Trump heading into Election Day.

Still, about 22 percent of the early and absentee votes were made by independents, whose preference is almost impossible to divine from the shifting public-opinion polls.

Public-opinion surveys show a tight race, with a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday that had Clinton ahead of Trump by 46-45 percent, a statistical tie.

Trump’s campaign has boasted that it’s in better shape than Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, when Democrats had a bigger margin of 177,000 votes, or 3.7 points. However, due to changes in the voter rolls and a huge number of GOP Election Day voters casting early ballots, the 2012 pre-Election Day lead for Democrats on an adjusted basis could be as low as 71,000 in comparison to this year’s early vote lead.

Also in 2012, Republicans out-voted Democrats by a margin of 1.1 percentage points and many expect the GOP to do the same again. But it wasn’t enough in 2012, when Romney lost to President Obama by less than a point.

Republicans turn out at higher rates than Democrats, but active registered Democratic voters outnumber the GOP’s voters by 327,000, or 2.5 points.

Democrats’ strength heading into Election Day: the Miami media market, which includes the counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe. There, they have run up a lead of almost 321,000 early and absentee votes.

Florida has 10 total media markets that cover varying regions of the state and include different combinations of the state's 67 counties. None gave one party the advantage that Miami's market gave to the Democrats.

Democrats are ahead in three other media markets: West Palm (by 49,142); Gainesville (by 17,562) and Tallahassee (by 30,146).

Republicans are ahead of Democrats in the Naples-Fort Myers market (by 107,813); Jacksonville (by 78,168); Pensacola (by 68,965); Tampa (by 43,931); Panama City (by 18,864); and Orlando (by 9,717).