Just a couple of followup items for things we discussed during early voting, now that we have more complete data. The first was about how much of the vote would be cast early, and whether Republicans were waiting until Election Day to really show up. Here’s what the numbers look like:
Statewide
Early E-Day Total Early%
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GOP 1,370,502 795,242 2,165,744 63.3%
Dem 1,528,892 782,934 2,311,826 66.1%
Harris County
Early E-Day Total Early%
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GOP 126,512 70,877 197,389 64.1%
Dem 222,352 141,471 363,826 61.1%
There were in fact more Republican primary votes cast on Election Day statewide than there were Democratic primary votes, but not by a lot. Democrats still cast about 150K more votes total than Republicans did. Because fewer Republicans voted early, their share of Election Day votes was higher than it was for Democrats, but in both cases a significant majority of the vote was cast before Election Day. This is consistent with the overall trend towards more early voting. I have a lightly-held theory that in elections like this one where there’s a lot of contested races and interest in at least one of those races, which is contributing to a higher level of turnout in early voting, a greater share of the vote will be cast early than for lower-interest elections. Basically, when people are more excited about voting they tend to do it as soon as they can. I may try to quantify that someday, or I may suggest it to a professional type, but that’s my subjective observation. It’s also something to keep in mind in the future, to avoid wildly overestimating total turnout based on an enthusiastic early showing.
Here now is a final look at each parties’ turnout in a number of interesting counties, based on this earlier look when we didn’t yet have complete early voting data.
County 2026 D 2026 R 2022 D 2022 R
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Bexar 191,097 94,199 50,516 47,167
Brazoria 29,828 31,518 11,480 31,122
Caldwell 3,505 3,527 1,439 3,601
Chambers 1,680 7,570 637 7,385
Collin 95,523 102,289 36,895 81,141
Comal 11,961 28,969 4,917 24,249
Dallas 277,363 102,269 129,584 88,210
Denton 82,491 87,005 27,516 68,442
El Paso 66,292 24,050 37,624 18,290
Ellis 18,649 24,735 5,496 18,811
Fort Bend 85,094 54,831 41,109 46,480
Galveston 24,425 33,103 11,341 31,309
Guadalupe 13,320 17,895 4,805 20,734
Hays 33,742 18,427 13,154 15,691
Hidalgo 61,480 18,809 43,059 15,306
Johnson 8,418 20,293 2,513 17,263
Kaufman 12,223 14,380 3,079 11,960
Liberty 2,778 10,038 988 8,255
Lubbock 15,520 29,818 5,663 28,014
McLennan 14,936 23,074 6,009 22,809
Medina 2,863 6,720 1,266 7,002
Midland 3,965 14,297 1,531 15,016
Montgomery 31,322 78,880 10,758 72,606
Rockwall 7,880 17,147 2,547 13,561
Tarrant 188,476 145,329 75,125 132,848
Travis 216,231 55,697 109,646 46,679
Waller 3,997 5,960 1,245 4,759
Williamson 64,725 52,100 26,335 48,156
The same observations as before apply here. Democratic turnout was up by a lot pretty much everywhere, even in places with minimal local Democratic presence. I don’t know which of these counties impressed me the most, but Comal, Ellis, Guadalupe, Johnson, Montgomery, and Rockwall all had me smiling and nodding my head. Obviously Tarrant and Bexar are superb, but they did have high-profile lower-tier races – for Congress, the Lege, and county offices – that pushed people to the polls beyond what Talarico and Crockett were doing. Big kudos also to Collin and Denton, which maybe we can credibly dream on as true swing counties this cycle. It’s a lot easier to imagine close statewide races if that is the case. And I included a number of high-growth, dark red counties in this roundup precisely because those places are where Republicans have run up the score in the past. Cutting down those margins is a must have.
On the flip side, Republicans did do very well in a couple of places – Bexar again, where there were three very busy Congressional races in addition to State House and local contests – they more or less kept up with population growth in some others, and they lost ground in absolute (Caldwell, Guadalupe, Medina, Midland) or population-adjusted (Brazoria for sure, likely Montgomery and Williamson) in others. Some of those hot Congressional races from Bexar spilled over into Medina (CD23) and Guadalupe (CD35), and I’d think Republicans are looking at some of these numbers and feeling a bit anxious about them. Fine by me.
Anyway. I don’t want to overreach. November will be different than March was. The runoffs won’t tell us much, either – barring a Paxton payoff scenario I expect Republicans to outdo Dems in the runoff because they’re the only ones that will have a hot statewide race on the ballot. I’ll be looking for the April and July finance reports to give some more signals about what’s happening. Do people like Katy Padilla Stout and Maureen Galindo raise more money? Do any of the lesser-heralded candidates from longer-shot districts raise more money, as we saw in 2018? That will tell me something. What do you think?