Monday and Tuesday — the last 48 hours

Rendered 2026-08-19 18:05 ET from MONDAY_TUESDAY_plan.md. Do not edit this page by hand — edit the markdown and re-run render_plan_mt.py.

Early voting is over. 40,267 Republican ballots, 49% of this entire election, have not been cast and cannot be reached until Tuesday morning. Banked stands at 45,239 of a 83,014 projection.

Everything below follows from one number: Election Day is not the tail of this race, it is half of it.

Numbers in this plan are rendered from deploy/site_context.json at build time. Do not hand-edit them. Re-run render_plan_mt.py after any pipeline run.

The allocation principle, stated once

Bay and Leon are nearly tied on raw Election Day volume — 8,970 against 8,121 ballots, 22.3% and 20.2% of Tuesday. They are not worth the same and should not be staffed the same.

Weighted by Rogers's share in each market, Bay yields 2,512 Rogers votes on Tuesday against Leon's 910. Bay is worth 2.8x what Leon is worth while carrying only 1.10x the ballots.

Every staffing decision in this document is made on the right-hand column, not the middle one. A volunteer-hour in Bay is worth roughly three in Leon.

MONDAY AUG 17 — the last day anything can be built

No early voting anywhere in Florida. Nothing that happens today shows up as a vote today; everything today is setup for tomorrow.

Before noon — signs go out, and this is the day's real deliverable

The list is on the site — filterable by county, sortable, with the spreadsheet downloadable from the same page. SIGN_precincts_top150.xlsx is the same data. 150 precincts carrying 84% of Tuesday's Republican Election Day vote.

Why 150 and not 100: precincts 101-150 carry 6,070 Election Day Republicans, an average of 121 each. Precincts 151-200 carry only 3,559 (71 each) and the last 124 average 21 apiece, which is below the value of a crew's drive time. 150 is the knee of the curve, and it is where coverage of Rogers's available votes reaches 88%.

• Ranked by projected Republican Election Day ballots, adjusted for how much each precinct is holding back rather than by registration or total turnout. A large precinct that already banked its vote is a wasted sign.
• Every county has a floor of 3 precincts so the district is covered. Those rows are marked coverage. They are presence, not priority — do not pull a crew off a volume precinct to service one.
• Polling place names exist only for Bay. Everywhere else match the precinct number against the county Supervisor of Elections list before dispatch.

Sequence the drop by drive time, not by rank. The list is sorted by value; the route is not. Bay's 29 precincts are the densest cluster in the district and one crew can cover most of them. Jackson's 12 and Washington's 9 chain together off 231 and 90. Send the long-haul counties first thing — Taylor, Madison, Jefferson and Lafayette are two hours out and will eat the morning if they are left for the afternoon.

Signs must be placed outside the 150-foot no-solicitation zone. Fla. Stat. 102.031(4). Not 200 — 150. A sign inside the line gets pulled by the clerk and the campaign gets a phone call, and on the morning of an election nobody has time to re-drive a precinct.

Midday to 3 PM — the candidate does radio and TV, NOT doors

Corrected Aug 16. An earlier draft of this page sent the candidate to Bay and Jackson doors this afternoon. That contradicted the Final Week Plan and the Final Week Plan is right: a candidate knocking doors on the last afternoon reaches perhaps fifty households, while drive-time radio in the Panama City market reaches thousands of Bay commuters the night before they vote. WMBB / WJHG Monday evening news is the same trade.

Field still does doors and phones in Bay and Jackson — 38% of the Rogers votes still on the table. It is the candidate's own hours that are better spent on air.

• Afternoon: PC-market radio and TV. The last mass touch that exists.
• 5–6 PM: volunteer launch for Tuesday. A hundred volunteers leaving energised is worth more Tuesday than fifty doors Monday.
• From 6:45 PM: in Bay County, camera-ready, reachable. The Trump eve-of-election window is ~7:00 PM CT, confirmed twice this cycle. Being in Tallahassee or in a car at that moment costs the news cycle it would win.
• Not Leon. He should not be in Tallahassee at all today.

The endorsement-trigger owner must be named and reachable by 5 PM.

Full day-by-day detail, precinct targets and the statutory rules live in the Final Week Plan. This page is the Monday/Tuesday operational sheet; where the two ever disagree, the Final Week Plan governs.

Late afternoon — the four readiness items

These have slipped and today is the last day for all of them:

1. Signage — was a hard stop Saturday. Now overdue and it is the morning's whole job.
2. Door hangers — was due yesterday. If they are not out by dark they do not get out.
3. Voter-credit pull — the file of who has already voted. Without it Tuesday's phones burn hours calling people who voted last week.
4. Press release — needs to be written today and held for release, not written tomorrow.

6:00 PM CT — Phase 2 hard freeze

The model stops changing. Only enr_election_ids.json may be touched after this, because counties publish those IDs late and election night cannot read results without them.

Anything not decided by 6 PM Monday is decided by default.

TUESDAY AUG 18 — the revised volunteer plan

Polls are open 7 AM to 7 PM local time in both zones. The district spans two: Bay, Jackson, Walton, Washington, Holmes and Calhoun are Central and close a full hour after everyone else.

Allocation

Scaled to Rogers votes available, not turnout. Pick the column matching your actual headcount:

Remaining counties take whatever is left after these eight are covered. If you are short of 30, cut from the bottom, not evenly across the top. Thinning Bay to spread bodies into Gadsden and Liberty trades 2,512 available Rogers votes for 354.

Where a single body is worth the most

Highest projected Republican Election Day volume in one location:

Wakulla 2 is the single densest polling place in the district and it sits in the Eastern zone, so it closes an hour before Bay. If you have one strong volunteer with no travel constraint, that is where they go.

Note Walton 530 — it is holding back rather than banking, which is exactly the profile you want at a sign location.

The shape of the day

7 AM to 9 AM. Heaviest Republican window. Every assigned precinct staffed at open. This is the block that cannot be recovered if it is missed.

9 AM to 3 PM. Thinner. Consolidate — pull from coverage precincts into the top-20 volume precincts. Runners restock signs blown down overnight.

3 PM to 7 PM. Second peak. Everyone back out. Central-zone counties get the last hour to themselves — when the Eastern polls close at 7 PM ET, Bay, Jackson, Walton, Washington, Holmes and Calhoun still have a full hour of voting. Do not stand down the Central crews when the first results start moving.

The candidate on Tuesday

Bay all day. This was argued out and the arithmetic has not moved: Bay is 2.8x Leon in Rogers votes available and it votes an hour later, so his presence there extends across the longest live window in the district. Starting in Leon and working back spends the morning in the weakest market and arrives in the strongest one after its best hours are gone.

Election night — read the board correctly

Full detail is on the Election Night page, which is now generated from the model. Two things belong here because they change behaviour in the room:

Shares on the board are percent of ballots cast, not poll shares. A results board has no undecided column. Expect Rogers around 33.8%, not the low twenties. Until Aug 16 this was wrong on the site and would have read a ten-point shortfall as on track.

7:00 PM ET is his worst moment and it is the forecast. Ten Eastern counties dump mail and early vote at once, Leon is the largest piece of it, and Bay does not exist on the board yet.

Nobody calls anyone, concedes anything or briefs a reporter before 8:15 PM ET. He is going to appear to be losing for a full hour.

The single most useful number of the night is Bay's first report at 8:00 PM ET.

Where this plan is soft

Walton is fine — the earlier 0.29x alarm was a measurement error and is withdrawn. Walton's early vote finished at 0.826x of its own 2024 Republican early vote, in line with the district. Its projected early vote was 1,662 and it banked 1,661.

The error is worth recording so it is not repeated. live_turnout.json is already CD2-weighted — Walton's raw county early vote of 4,745 is stored as 4,745 x 0.35 = 1,661. method_mix.json stores the full-county 2024 figure (5,742). Comparing the weighted live number against the unweighted history produced a fake 0.29x. Only Walton and Lafayette can show this failure, because they are the only two counties carrying a CD2 weight. Never multiply a live_turnout value by a CD2 weight again — the model does not, which is why the model was right and the ad-hoc check was wrong.

Bay's precinct data is the weakest where it matters most. Bay's precinct join is ~86% against 96% district-wide because it redrew its lines, and Bay 27-30 exist in the voter file but not in the county feed at all. Bay 29 alone projects 422 Election Day Republicans. Staff it; just know its number is an estimate built without feed confirmation.

The 7:15 PM expectation is the softest of the three checkpoints. The share scaling applies one district-wide factor, but undecided is not uniform across markets — Panama City carries more of it than Leon. Treat 8:15 PM as the first number worth acting on.

One poll, one sponsor. The anchor is the Aug 10-11 co/efficient wave, commissioned by a pro-Rogers PAC, with no published August crosstab. Every market split holds July's geography scaled to new district totals.