Hillary in Philadelphia, and it feels like the ’64 Phillies

African-Americans traditionally dominate early in-person voting. But they didn’t show in force this weekend. And Hastings said he wasn’t surprised. After Sunday night’s polls closed, black voters accounted for 16 percent of the in-person early vote ballots cast. And that included five previous days of in-person early voting.

But in 2012, in just two days of in-person early voting, blacks cast 25 percent of those early ballots, according to Dan Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who published some of the early voting data on his must-read Election Smith blog.

Due to such strong African-American turnout after the beginning of in-person early voting in 2012, Democrats began outpacing Republicans in total ballots cast before Election Day, by about 10,000. This year, though, Republicans still cling to their own lead of about 9,000. As of Monday morning about 3.7 million absentee and in-person early ballots had been cast, 40.5 percent of them by Republicans and 40.2 percent by Democrats.

“The black vote is way underperforming compared to 2012,” Smith said.