DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” on Sunday that President Barack Obama has won Florida, thanks to early voters and the campaign’s “strong ground game.”
Wasserman Schultz, who represents a Florida district in Congress, called the state for Obama in part because of absentee ballot figures.
“We cut the absentee ballot advantage of Republicans by 85 percent,” Wasserman Schultz said. “If you go to Saturday last week, they had 36,000 absentee ballots when normally they had more than 200,000 absentee ballots more than us. When early voting ended yesterday, combined between absentee balloting and early votes cast, we have 104,000 more Democrats as of Friday that have cast ballots.”
“We have really run circles around them due to a very strong effective ground game,” Wasserman Schultz added. “There’s been an explosive turnout of Democrats in major counties. Just yesterday we had single day records in major counties around the state of Florida.”
An Obama campaign press release this weekend claimed Democrats have registered 1.8 million voters in key battleground states. By Saturday, 28 percent — or approximately 350,000 — of those registered voters had already turned in ballots, according to the release.
“In Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada, 1.4 million non-midterm Democrats have voted already, compared with just 840,000 non-midterm Republicans,” the release states.
“Unlike campaigns of the past, our volunteers are not driving to some large office miles from their homes and handed a phone and a call sheet,” the release adds. “Instead, Canvass Captains, Phone Bank Captains and scores of local volunteers will be knocking on the doors of the very voters they registered, have been talking to for months and know personally. And they will be directing them to polling locations in their communities – the schools their kids go to, the places of worship they attend each week and community centers they know well.”