Florida Party Voting From 2020 to 2024

First off, my apologies for being AWOL from blogging for a while. Partially this is due to my teaching responsibilities (I do have a day job), but mostly because I’m only just starting to get the data needed to analyze what happened in the 2024 general election.

Which leads us to Florida. About a week ago, Florida posted a voter file with the 2024 vote history. This file is a fairly accurate depiction of who voted, although there has been a small amount of purging activity as people move or pass away, amounting to 10,029 persons out of 11 million 2024 voters. Florida should release another election “recap” file in about a month that includes these removed voters. The absence of these voters should not matter much to the analysis that follows.

I have the 2020 recap file, which makes it now possible by linking voter registration identifiers across elections to examine at the individual level who voted in 2020 and who voted in 2024, and perhaps more enlightening who did not vote in 2020 or in 2024.

I’ve been posting and updating the national and state turnout rates. (I will have more to post about turnout soon — I like to withhold my analyses until all the states that will do so report their total ballots counted.) Florida had 140,646 fewer people participate in 2024 than in 2020, which represents a turnout rate decline of 4.1 percentage points from 70.8 to 66.7 percent. Florida’s decline was steeper than the national decline of 2.5 points from 66.4 to 63.9 points.

There is always churn in the electorate with some voters leaving and some entering the electorate from election to election, even if overall turnout goes up or down. It is possible to track this churn by linking voter files across elections. Doing so, there were 2,648,796 registered voters who voted in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, and 2,479,174 who voted in 2024 but did not vote in 2020. (The accounting nearly works out but there are always data gremlins lurking voters files. I don’t think this greatly affects the analysis.)

Florida is a closed primary state, which means that party registration is available on the voter file. Below, I plot who voted and did not vote in 2020 and 2024 by their party registration.