Turnout information for early voting for all counties is available on the Secretary of State website. They used to only have this for the 30 most populous counties, which skewed things in a Democratic direction, but a law passed in 2019 required the data to be made available for all counties. Now that early voting has been completed, let’s see what the totals looked like in other counties of interest around the state.
Unfortunately, we can’t make a direct comparison for some of the counties I was interested in because as noted the SOS only has EV data for thirty counties. So what I did instead was collect the final turnout information for the 2018 Senate primaries in both parties. What that means is that the data below is a bit skewed, since we’re comparing EV turnout to overall turnout. Even there, “overall turnout” is a bit misleading since there are always undervotes, and the data I’ve captured for 2018 doesn’t include that. The 2022 numbers includes everyone who showed up, the 2018 data only has the ones who voted in their Senate races. It’s the best I can do. Here’s what it looks like:
County 2018 Dem 2018 GOP 2022 Dem 2022 GOP
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Bell 7,282 18,149 4,550 9,574
Bexar 81,408 67,977 60,033 50,025
Brazoria 10,085 24,376 6,809 20,323
Brazos 5,131 12,365 2,241 7,902
Collin 34,669 66,078 20,784 43,779
Comal 4,150 17,662 3,040 13,530
Dallas 123,671 80,583 66,109 38,928
Denton 27,025 49,474 14,683 37,288
El Paso 54,184 12,096 20,320 9,199
Ellis 4,243 15,906 2,479 8,136
Fort Bend 29,322 34,707 25,646 28,275
Hays 11,397 11,881 7,316 8,210
Johnson 2,618 12,280 1,224 8,175
Lubbock 5,900 21,964 3,267 17,184
Montgomery 9,701 48,921 6,052 41,596
Nueces 12,345 12,553 6,682 9,962
Smith 4,704 22,826 3,933 15,481
Tarrant 71,876 105,317 38,674 70,021
Travis 113,070 39,177 58,329 23,357
Williamson 25,681 35,675 14,558 26,672
For the most part, nothing terribly exciting. Overall Democratic turnout is about 627K, about 62% of the 2018 Senate race total of 1.04 million. Republicans are at about 1.02 million, or about 66% of the way to the 1.55 million they had in their Senate primary. While I talked about the “premier races” driving turnout statewide in the last entry, conditions in an individual county can vary. High profile and/or expensive races for Congress, County Judge, or other local offices can have an effect. Different counties have different patterns for how much of the vote is cast early versus on Election Day. We also have to consider the effect of SB1 on mail ballots. So far this year there have been 49,888 Republican primary ballots cast by mail, compared to 71,329 for the Dems. We don’t know the total figures for 2018, but a look at the top 30 county numbers makes it clear that Republicans used mail ballots a lot more four years ago.
So overall I don’t see too much that stands out. The one place that is a bit remarkable is El Paso, where Democratic voting is down quite a bit from 2018. We know that Beto was a big draw overall in El Paso, more so in the general, but remember that in 2018 there was also the primary to succeed Beto in Congress, and it was a fairly expensive race that featured then-County Judge and now Rep. Veronica Escobar. I suspect that drove some people to the polls as well.
What about the South Texas/Rio Grande Valley counties that shifted red in 2020? Here’s the same sample I looked at before, updated for the 2022 numbers:
County 2018 Dem 2018 GOP 2022 Dem 2022 GOP
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Cameron 14,123 4,003 14,500 6,455
Hidalgo 37,739 7,050 31,924 10,398
Maverick 6,300 111 6,895 440
Starr 6,729 15 5,188 969
Webb 21,137 1,426 13,384 1,499
Definitely more participation on the Republican side, exceeding the final 2018 totals in all five counties, though overall those numbers are still quite low compared to the Dems. Democratic numbers in Cameron and Maverick have also topped their 2018 counterparts, and are not far behind in Hidalgo and Starr. I’m a little puzzled by Webb, since that’s the center of the CD28 primary battle, but maybe that’s a mostly-vote-on-Election-Day place. We’ll see tomorrow. Have you voted yet?
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