Turnout was way, way up on the final day of early voting with 64,247 Marylanders going to the polls. So far, 8.59% of all registered voters have cast ballots.

The Democrats had a especially good day. 1.94% of registered Democrats voted on Day 8 as compared to 1.83% of Republicans and 1.02% of unaffiliated voters. That brought the final rate of Democratic participation up to 9.29%–0.12% higher than the Republican rate of 9.17% and the unaffiliated rate of 4.30%

Indeed, Democrats have now finally posted a gain in the number of voters from 2010. The total number of registered Democrats who have voted is up 48,809 as compared to 28,509 for Republicans and 10,008 for the unaffiliated. That gives the Democrats an increase in their raw vote advantage over the Republicans of 20,300 votes banked from 2010. The increased advantage held by Democrats over Republicans and unaffiliated is 10,291–a nice reversal from the close on Day 7 for Team Blue.

However, the Republicans have done a better job of increasing their vote from 2010. The number of Democrats who voted early is up 34.8% in 2014 compared to 48.7% for Republicans and 54.6% for unaffiliated voters.

In short, Democrats have benefited from the expansion of early voting because more people voted and there are far more Democrats than Republicans in Maryland. But they gained less than they should have because the Republicans did a better job of turning out early voters than in 2010 and narrowed the gap with Democrats despite their strong Day 8 finish.

The following table shows the final tallies in each county. Clearly, counties in the Baltimore suburbs and Eastern Shore did a better job of turning out voters than those in the Washington region, Baltimore City, or Western Maryland. The county numbers correlate well with those from 2010 as @mdtruth has explained.

In terms of county turnout on the final day, Prince George’s performed above the state average with 1.24% of Prince Georgians casting an early ballot, helping it finish not too far below the state average. Baltimore City and Montgomery continued to under perform with just 0.97% of Charm City voters and 0.80% of MoCO voters going to the polls.

And thus ends my first blog post ever from an airplane! I’ll try to provide more analysis later.