Texas has set a midterm record that will shape how the rest of the campaign is understood. More than 4 million Texans had voted after one week of early voting, a figure ABC13 Houston called historic for a midterm, with four days of early voting remaining before Election Day on November 3. Harris County, the state’s largest county, recorded more than 620,000 voters, just under 23 percent of its registered voters, well above the county’s pace at the same point in the previous midterm, though still below the statewide rate and below several nearby counties including Fort Bend, Brazoria, Galveston and Austin. Some rural counties had already seen roughly a third or more of registered voters cast ballots. The pattern is not uniform, and that unevenness is itself informative: turnout is surging, but it is surging at different rates in different places, for different reasons.
Why Texas matters nationally
Texas matters because of its size and its races. The state leads the country in ballots cast so far, and its Senate race, in which Texas is described in recent coverage as the tipping point race in a map that runs through 35 states, will help decide control of the Senate. Early voting data cannot predict that race, and analysts warn against treating it as a prediction. James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told ABC13 that Republicans are more likely, historically, to wait until Election Day to vote, and predicted heavy turnout on that day. That caution applies to every early voting story: the voters who vote early are not a random sample of the electorate, and the voters who wait may vote differently.
The record, in context
Nationally, early voting is running about 10 percent ahead of the 2022 midterm pace, with nearly 27 million ballots cast by October 25 across 46 reporting states. Texas accounts for a large share of that total, and its 74 percent increase in early voting compared with the same stage in 2022, reported by the Associated Press based on state data, is one of the largest jumps in the country. The Texas early voting report notes that political scientists interviewed by ABC13 warned against drawing firm conclusions from the early numbers, and that warning should travel with every Texas headline in the final week. A record is a fact about participation. It is not a fact about outcome, and the distinction will matter more as Election Day approaches and the early vote is joined by the Election Day vote that has historically favoured a different part of the electorate.
