Sunday is the shortest and least busy day of early voting, and it is the transition to Week 2, when all the days are 12 hours long and numbers start to go way up. Here’s what this Sunday looked like.
EV 2010
EV 2014
Day 6 EV 2018 totals
Year Party Mail In Person Total
=======================================
2010 Dem 4,129 11,533 15,662
2010 Rep 8,498 17,900 26,398
2014 Dem 3,592 8,399 11,991
2014 Rep 12,288 19,649 31,937
2018 Dem 9,620 24,935 34,555
2018 Rep 12,642 22,394 35,036
Another day where more Democrats voted; Dems have almost caught up to Republicans in overall turnout. Dems have already exceeded their early vote total from 2014 (which was 31,688) and should pass 2012 (38,911) and 2010 (40,963) no later than Tuesday morning. Tomorrow I’ll look at the historical pattern in early voting turnout in Democratic primaries so we can begin to get a feel for what final turnout might be.
I’ve looked at the daily early vote returns from the Secretary of State, which tracks the numbers from the 15 biggest counties – the totals through Saturday are here. The thing about this is that the composition of the top 15 changes over time – for 2010 and 2014, Nueces County was on the list, but this year Brazoria County made the cut. As such, we can’t do the same-day comparisons for Brazoria, but we can get a bit of context by looking at the final EV totals, which you can see here: 2010 Dem, 2010 Rep, 2014 Dem, and 2014 Rep. In short:
2010 Dem = 5,828 total votes, 3.15% turnout – 2,189 votes were cast early
2010 Rep = 23,514 total votes, 14.01% turnout – 12,019 votes were cast early
2014 Dem = 2,933 total votes, 1.64% turnout – 1,542 votes were cast early
2014 Rep = 18,842 total votes, 10.56% turnout – 11,275 votes were cast early
2018 Dem = 2,133 votes so far, 1.06% turnout
2018 Rep = 7,123 votes so far, 3.54% turnout
Remember that the 2018 numbers are through Saturday, which is to say Day 5 of 11. This is more than the entire early turnout from 2014 and almost as much as 2010. I’d expect the early vote in Brazoria County to surpass final turnout from the 2014 primary on Tuesday, and will probably bypass final turnout from 2010 on Friday. So there you have it.