It's not quite really the black belt, but it's similar to black belt, isn't it?

Yeah, you got it.

And, you know, and.

Chuck, they called 60,000 people that night Wow.

I mean, so, I mean, you know, without, I mean, again, this was not, they didn't have a big staff operation.

This was just, like, volunteers signaled, messaging, texting each other, getting on the auto dialer.

I mean, really pretty impressive stuff.

What is what message should we take from the closeness of this four years removed from an absolute whitewashing of Democrats by by DeSantis?

let's bring in florida political strategist steve shale is back with us you can check out his work he's got some really great insight at man of florida.substack.com you could also follow him on x for more at steve shale steve really appreciate you joining us this morning to talk about these early vote totals i'm always cautious taking too much away from them but what have you seen so far that stands out to you

Yeah, Ryan, I mean, I think it's important.

Your caveat's important.

Like, there's nothing predictive about these things.

We don't know how people have actually voted, and I think people can read a lot into these raw numbers.

So for me, it's sort of less interesting about, like, you know, what the raw number says.

It's sort of more interesting about who we know about those people and who's showing up and who's not.

You know, Governor DeSantis runs away with it by like 20 points.

Republican candidate, African-American, a congressman, quite MAGA.

Yeah, I mean, talented guy.

I've known Byron for 15, 10, 15 years now.

I like him personally.

I mean, he's a talented political athlete.

You know, and the other thing about Florida is, you know, our economy is based entirely on other people spending money.

So when things are bad elsewhere, they tend to be really bad here.

So maybe give us a quick walk through those.

You

know, these days you can track voter turnout literally in real time.

which is a wonderful thing, so you can kinda make some adjustments.

And I always tell folks, be careful not to read too much into, for example, the early voting absentee ballot voting data in terms of who is gonna win.

But it can be a useful tool for campaigns to know who's voting and who's not.

So for example, right now, you look at the data, at least as of this weekend, the people that have voted so far were the kind of people that you know vote you in pretty much every election so again if you're a democrat knowing you need to turn out more infrequent voters that data is useful to you and going well maybe i need to go spend a little more time talking in communities that tend to have more infrequent voters um and so that's that's a lot of it um you know but at this point you're getting pretty close to the cake being baked i mean you're you know you don't typically plan travel much more than much less than five or six days in advance you're gonna make your last media buys probably no later than thursday or friday of this week and so i mean we're getting pretty close to this thing

If you're the Jolly campaign, for example, where money's a little bit tighter and Florida's a really expensive state, how do you make those decisions?

Well, I've been on both sides of it.

of democratic socialists here in Florida that we didn't realize we had? Or was it more about her mobilizing the black vote, the minority vote here in a state that's so important for Democrats?

It was interesting, I think on the DSA front, if you look around the state, I mean, the DSA basically got throttled every place they ran outside of the Senate race.

And keep in mind, I mean, Angie is like a DSA for two weeks now.

I've known her for 20 years, it's the first time I've ever known this about her.

I think it was one of these situations, it was a low information race.

I mean, yes, Vindman raised a bunch of money, but he didn't spend a lot of money on voter communication.

He spent most of it on fundraising, LISTAC, which is a position of the things you kind of do to get ready for a general election.

So looking ahead to the general election, how big of a built in advantage do you think there is right now for Republicans in this state? And how big of a blue wave would it need to be for candidates like a David Jolly or maybe an Annette Taddeo in the CFO race to pull off an upset?