Let’s get right to it. Here is the Day Three EV report for the primary runoffs. Here are the vote totals through Wednesday:
Party Mail Early Total
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Dem 15,675 10,993 26,668
GOP 12,735 26,794 39,527
And as a reminder, here they were for Day One:
Party Mail Early Total
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Dem 20,357 3,050 23,407
GOP 20,735 8,049 28,782
You may be wondering, as was Campos and as was I, what happened with the mail ballot totals? I called the Election Office to ask. The short answer is that they accidentally combined the Dem and GOP mail ballot totals in putting together the Monday report. They realized the error Tuesday morning, found where they had gone wrong, and fixed it for the Tuesday evening report. If you compare the numbers in the daily report to those in the unofficial ballot by mail report, the totals will match – I checked that on Wednesday before the Day Three report came out, and both it and the early voting roster numbers synched up. That’s all there was to it.
As for turnout so far, obviously the Republicans have more. The AG race is probably the main driver, but runoffs are funny, with a shorter timeframe for voting and fewer races of interest. In 2018, Dems went from 167,982 in the primary to 57,590 in the runoff. Republicans went from 156,387 in their primary to 50,959 in their runoff. I expect both to be exceeded this time around. Beyond that, not much to say. I’ll be voting today. Have you voted yet?
I’d say the main driver on the GOP side is the county judge race.
My social media feed is full of claims and counter claims for the GOP county judge race so you may be right. I don’t think their voters care about the Hotze indictments nearly as much as how one of them was a regular donor to Democrats. He’s the one that needs to win their runoff so more of their side skips the race altogether. Perceived RINOs don’t get nearly as many votes in their elections. Martinez for their loss!
A secondary driver of GOP turnout is the state house contest: Barineau v. DeAyala in a heavily GOP westside district.
Next in line might be the County Commissioner 2 contest between Mouton and Morman.
Certainly it is not coming from the CD 29 runoff, and surprisingly, I am not seeing energy in the CD 7 runoff.
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