Yesterday, the last day for early voting, was huge: Over 77K votes cast, with 51K of them being on the Democratic side. I didn’t get the report until almost midnight last night, and so didn’t finish this post until this morning. Good job getting out there, y’all. We’ll see what the statewide numbers look like in the next day or two.
Here are the final daily EV reports for the 2022 and 2018 primaries. And here are the final turnout numbers:
2022 turnout:
2018 turnout:
Here’s the Day Eleven EV report for this year, and the comparisons:
Year Mail Early Total
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2018 Dem 22,695 70,152 92,847
2018 GOP 24,500 61,425 85,925
2022 Dem 17,810 82,631 100,441
2022 GOP 11,064 97,941 109,005
2026 Dem 8,943 211,390 220,333
2026 GOP 4,891 121,622 126,513
I’ll have a post on past early vote history for primaries tomorrow, but here’s a preview: Democrats’ early vote total is higher than their final vote total in any 21st century primary except for 2008, 2016, and 2020, and they came close to 2016. It is their highest early vote total ever. Dems should set at least a new second-best final total when all is said and done, with an outside chance of topping the 410K who voted in 2008. For Republicans, this was actually their second best early vote total, falling short only to 2016. They too will probably end up with their second-best final total – they need a bit less than 80K votes to pass 2024, but 2016’s final total of 329K is almost certainly out of reach.
You’ll see those details tomorrow. For today, two notes to close on. One is that Jasmine Crockett got a couple of high-profile late endorsements, from Kamala Harris, who also recorded a robocall for her, and from Cardi B, who endorsed her on Instagram. Clearly, the Crockett-Talarico race has driven a bunch of this turnout. This should help a bit more.
And two, in terms of the polling, for which we got those two other results noted below that favor Talarico, see this note from G. Elliott Morris:
- The Texas Senate primaries are wide open — and don’t trust anyone who tells you otherwise. On the Republican side, Ken Paxton — a far-right attorney general with corruption problems, both personally and professionally — is leading Sen. John Cornyn in the polls by about 3 points, with Rep. Wesley Hunt pulling 20%. The race is almost certainly headed to a runoff, and Paxton looks favored there since Hunt’s entry ate into Cornyn’s support.
On the Democratic side, it’s state Rep. James Talarico vs. U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and the 50+1 polling average has them essentially tied.
But here’s the thing: Historically, primary polls in statewide races miss by about 13 points on margin, and the leader in the polls ends up losing roughly one in five times. With the low-quality polling we’re getting in this race — small samples, long field dates, and partisan-sponsored surveys that disagree wildly — it’s wise to expect a surprise.
And this is why I have expressed not so much skepticism as caution when I post about the primary poll results. The UT/Texas Tribune polls had a major belly flop a few years ago when their primary numbers were way off, so much so that the pollsters wrote an article explaining what had happened. I’ll have to hunt through the archives for it. It’s just hard to model who the electorate is because of turnout variations, and in a year like this where there are so many new voters, at least on the Dem side, it’s that much harder. Just be prepared for anything to happen.