I just got the latest numbers for early voting in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District. The district has 561,221 registered voters and as of this morning, 216,730 already have cast their votes. That means that 38.6% of registered voters in the district already have voted.

Breaking the numbers down by age, it is not too surprising that voters 65 and older lead early voting, with 49.3% of them already having voted. When the numbers first started coming in, there was concern about the youngest voters. For example, as of October 24, only 5.3% of voters 18-24 had voted while 26.3% of those 65 and over had voted. Today’s numbers, however, show that 27.7% of those 18-24 have voted. In raw numbers, the youngest group has gone from 3553 having voted on October 24 to 18,503 in today’s numbers. That’s a tremendous accomplishment by the GOTV effort. That effort is especially strong on the University of Florida campus.

Looking at ethnicity, 46.7% of African Americans have voted, while only 38.3% of whites and 30.3% of Hispanics have voted.

The party breakdown for voting is especially encouraging. There are 219,456 Democrats registered in the district compared to 231,633 Republicans. Yet, Democrats lead in early voting, 93,307 to 90,457. There are 110,132 independents and 32,966 of them have voted.

There still is much work to do to get out the rest of the voters tomorrow, but Democratic challenger Tim Cunha has much to feel encouraged about as he takes on incumbent Republican Cliff Stearns. This is a race considered "Safe Republican" by all those who do such ratings, but we are thinking that with a big push in these last few hours, a big surprise is in store for Mr. Stearns.