I still think it’s a little weird to have a day off from voting in the middle of early voting. Either tack on an extra day at one end or the other or modify the calendar to avoid the holiday. Or, you know, since Presidents Day is hardly a day of universal indulgence, maybe have voting on it anyway? I suppose some places might not be available, but maybe enough would be? I’m just thinking out loud here.
Anyway. Here are your Day Eight early voting totals. The table for comparison:
Election Mail Early Total
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2018 D 12,915 36,835 49,750
2018 R 15,512 33,140 48,652
2020 D 18,503 54,325 72,828
2020 R 19,410 47,271 66,681
2022 D 10,843 40,001 50,844
2022 R 6,955 49,786 56,741
As a reminder, 2018 final totals are here, and 2020 final totals are here.
Final turnout in 2018 was 167,982 for Dems and 156,387 for Republicans. I don’t see any reason why those totals won’t be eclipsed this year, though maybe not by that much on the Dem side. For what it’s worth, yesterday was the strongest mail ballot day for Dems so far, including Day One, with 2,717 ballots returned. If we are managing to fix the problems that had caused a bunch of ballots to be rejected initially, that would be a big deal. I would still very much like to know how the rejection numbers, both for applications and returned ballots, break down by party.
Derek Ryan put out another report on Monday. Of interest:
A lot has been made about South Texas and whether Republican growth was a temporary trend under President Trump. In Cameron County, turnout in the Republican Primary is 76% of the way to reaching turnout in the 2018 Republican Primary. In Hidalgo County, turnout is 65% of the way to reaching the 2018 totals. This is with five days early voters (today and the remainder of the work week) and Election Day voters left to increase those numbers. On the Democratic side, turnout in Cameron County is 59% of the way to reaching the turnout in the 2018 Democratic Primary and 47% of the way in Hidalgo County.
I expressed curiosity about that early on as well. It should be noted that there were 14K Dem primary votes in Cameron County in 2018 compared to 4K for the Republicans, and nearly 38K Dem votes in Hidalgo in 2018 compared to 7K for the GOP. In other words, still a lot more Dem votes being cast in each county. We’ll see where they all end up, but so far this doesn’t look like it’s going to rewrite anyone’s paradigms. Ask me again after the primary is over.