2020 Primary Runoff Early Voting, Second Monday: A statewide look

I’m not going to keep track of what day number we’re at now, as it doesn’t really make sense anymore. But what we can do right now is have a look at how each party is doing with mail votes. Here’s a quick comparison to March, with primary data for the entire early voting period, and runoff data through Sunday:


Election     Mail      Early      Total   Mail %
================================================
D primary 114,886    886,336  1,001,222    11.5%
R primary  91,415    987,744  1,079,159     8.5%

D runoff  153,239    155,101    308,340    49.7%
R runoff   81,421    131,142    212,563    38.3%

These are just early voting totals – there were still a bunch of votes cast on Election Day, all of which were of course in person. Dems did quite well with absentee ballots in the primary, which I would attribute largely to efforts in the big counties. About 28K of those Dem mail votes came from Harris, for example.

That was all done without a big push to get people who are eligible to vote by mail to do so. In the runoff, everyone has heard a lot about voting by mail, and everyone has concerns about their own safety voting in person. It’s not a big surprise then that the number of mail ballots has surged, in relative terms for both parties and in absolute terms for Dems; I expect Republicans will surpass their mail total from March as well this week. Other counties are carrying a bigger share of the load for Dems – while Harris made up almost 25% of the total mail ballots for Dems in March, they’re at about 21% so far in the runoff. I don’t have numbers from other counties but my understanding is that over 90% of the Harris mail ballots are coming from the 65 and over crowd, so it’s mostly people taking advantage of something that was already available to them. And good for them, because that’s exactly what they should be doing. I hope that continues right on through the end of the week.

As for where we are now in Harris:


Election     Mail    Early   Total   Mail %
===========================================
D primary  16,651   44,339  60,990    27.3%
R primary  18,949   39,207  58,156    32.6%

D runoff   34,782   29,978  64,760    53.7%
R runoff   21,409    8,691  30,100    71.1%

The Monday runoff EV file is here, and the final EV turnout report from March is here. If you’re thinking “Hey, this looks like higher turnout for a party primary runoff than what we’re used to seeing”, you are correct. I will discuss that in more detail next time.

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  1. Pingback: 2020 Primary Runoff Early Voting, Second Tuesday: A history of Democratic primary runoffs – Off the Kuff

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