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Fewer Texans — especially in the state’s largest cities — voted early this year compared to 2020, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data.
More than 9 million Texans either voted in person during the two weeks of early voting or returned their absentee ballots by Nov. 1, state data shows. That’s 48.6% of all registered voters. In 2020, 9.7 million, or 57.2% of registered voters, went to the polls or turned in their ballot during early voting.
The lag is largely attributed to a dramatic decline in mail-in voting. About 8.7 million Texans voted early in both 2020 and 2024. However, 937,870 Texans voted by mail in 2020 while 347,652 voted by mail this year.
Current data is not final and can be incomplete. Counties can accept mail ballots until Wednesday. And each county is responsible for self-reporting, and in some instances, counties do not share their numbers or report late. And a direct comparison to early voting to 2020 comes with a major caveat. Texans had three weeks to vote early in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and just two weeks this year. And four years ago, there was also a greater emphasis on mail-in ballots.
Election Day is Tuesday.
Despite the lag in turnout, the total number of Texans who have voted is staggering. Besides 2020, more people have already voted than the total number of people who voted in any previous presidential election, according to veteran consultant Derek Ryan who publishes a must-read report on early voting.
Four years ago, more than 11 million Texas voted, a high-water mark for a state that has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the U.S.
Democratic turnout appears to have lagged throughout the early voting period, a trend first noticed during the first three days of early voting.
Harris County Democratic Chair Mike Doyle said turnout was good, but it’s not shocking that the county had less turnout this year than in 2020 because of the pandemic and the extra week of voting. Harris County, which includes Houston, is the state’s most populous county.
“It does mean we have some ambitious targets for tomorrow,” Doyle said. “But we've been hitting the streets pretty damn hard for a long time.”
Doyle is cautiously optimistic and said a good day for Democrats would be about 300,000 voters. He added that they expect roughly half a million additional voters in Harris County on election day.
Democrats this year have hoped to boot U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the latest attempt to end their decades-long streak of losing statewide elections. Texas’ rural and suburban counties have long been Republican strongholds that vote at a higher rate than the state’s urban centers like Dallas, Austin and Houston.
Ryan, an adviser to GOP campaigns, said Democrats would need to see an increase in turnout in the top five populated counties on election day to win a statewide election.
“President Biden got 59% in those five counties four years ago but only got 25% of the vote in the most rural of the counties in the state,” Ryan said.
As of Monday, 58 solid red counties and six border counties broke their 2020 turnout record. Zapata County, home to about 8,000 people south of Laredo, saw the largest increase in its turnout rate: 14 percentage points.
No fast-changing, such as Colin County in North Texas, or big blue counties, like Travis or Bexar, outperformed their 2020 turnout. In fact, the state's largest counties all saw a similar decline in their turnout rate, between 10 and 12 percentage points.
Solid Republican counties have nearly matched their early voting totals from 2020, which could explain the trend that Republicans appear to be voting early more than Democrats based on their voting history.
It’s a reversal of sorts from 2020 when former President Donald Trump cast doubt on the process and encouraged his voters to only go to the polls on Election Day. According to Ryan’s tracking, 2.5 million voters who cast their ballot during the two weeks of early voting have previously voted in a Republican primary. That compared to 1.6 million voters who participated in a Democratic primary. Texas does not track voter registration by party. Using voting history in political party primaries offers a proxy during a general election.
“The electorate so far this cycle looks very similar to what it did in 2020,” Ryan said.