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As Florida eclipses 2016 early vote totals, Democratic turnout lags in Miami-Dade

With one week to go before Nov. 3, Florida has already surpassed its pre-Election Day voting totals from 2016.

On Tuesday, as voters continued streaming into early voting sites and elections officials tallied new mail ballots, the state blew past the 2016 total of about 6.6 million votes cast before Election Day, thanks in large part to a record 3.9 million mail ballots processed so far. A total of almost 6.8 million ballots had been cast in Florida by late Tuesday.

But while statewide turnout has been impressive, turnout in Miami-Dade County — and among Democrats in particular — has been lagging somewhat. Entering Tuesday, about 46% of all registered voters in Florida had cast ballots, including 42% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans and 20% of independents, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

Florida’s top prosecutor once sued Trump. Now she’s fighting for his reelection.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody ran on a promise to keep her office out of politics. Two years later, she’s become one of Donald Trump’s biggest surrogates in the nation’s biggest swing state.

Moody, a former college Democrat whose family once sued Trump over a condominium dispute, has jumped into conservative causes with gusto, attending presidential campaign rallies and stepping out as a defender for the GOP president. She’s making appearances on right-wing media and has become a voice for the Republican Attorneys General Association.

In the run-up to the election, the former judge has taken on billionaire Michael Bloomberg and joined 10 other Republican attorneys general backing the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google. And she could be at the center of the post-election fallout if the results in Florida are called into question.

Florida pandemic-related jobless claims climb 81K in past week

The number of new jobless claims related to the coronavirus pandemic decreased in the past week in Florida for the first time in about a month, according to Florida Department of Economic Opportunity data released this week.

There were about 81,000 new unemployment filings in Florida related to the COVID-19 outbreak in the past week. That’s down about 27,000 claims from the second week of October when 108,000 new claims were filed.

The past week’s new claims are also below other weeks in Florida when new jobless claims were hovering around 87,000 new filings each week this fall. October saw a steep increase in unemployment claims related to the pandemic after weekly new filings fell to as little as 60,000 new claims in one week in September.

'We need teachers.' USF, districts at odds over College of Education cuts.

A major disagreement over the future of teacher training in Tampa Bay played out in dueling public statements issued late Tuesday by the University of South Florida and the Pinellas County school district.

In an op-ed submitted to the Tampa Bay Times, university officials stood by their decision, announced last week, to phase out undergraduate programs in the College of Education. They said it was part of a “strategic realignment” driven in large part by a steep drop in the college’s enrollment over the last decade. Graduate programs, they said, would continue and be improved.

A short time later, the Pinellas County School Board approved a resolution criticizing USF’s decision and urging the university to reconsider. The resolution said Pinellas schools rely heavily on USF’s undergraduate program as it hires 600 to 800 new teachers each year. About a quarter of them come from USF.