(The Hill)— Record numbers of Texans turned out Monday for the first day of early voting — numbers that were particularly concentrated in several of the state’s blue-leaning urban and suburban counties.
With national attention drawn to the close race between incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and his challenger, Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, the first polls in the state opened early Monday.
About 125,000 turned out to vote in Harris County, home of Houston — half again as many as turned out in the general election of 2016, the last year for which there are statistics from the Texas secretary of state.
Travis County, the home of Austin, broke records with 46,600 people showing up on the first day, which the county clerk said topped first-day voting in the last three elections.
Nearly 47,000 people voted in Bexar, the home of San Antonio, where some voters waited for more than two hours in line to vote.
Turnout was also up well over 2016 levels in more purple, suburban counties like the Houston suburbs of Fort Bend and the Dallas suburb of Collin County.
These rising numbers can be explained in part by the fact that there are a lot more Texans than there used to be — a function of both the state’s high birthrate and migration from other states. Between 2016 and 2024, Texas’s population grew by 15 percent.
But it may also in part be a result of the steady increase in the number of registered voters in the state, which has risen faster than the population as a whole, as the Houston Chronicle reported.
Over that same period, the share of registered voters in Texas has increased by 22 percent — 7 points more than the overall rise in population.
And the share of those registered voters who ultimately cast a ballot has increased as well: a steady march up from 58 percent in 2012 to 66 percent in 2020.
Who have those trends benefited? At first glance, Democrats. The rise in both the share of registrations and in turnout among registered voters has correlated with steadily tightening national and statewide elections in Texas, which can be seen in the shrinking margins of Republican victories in recent years.
In 2020, former President Trump won the state with a margin of just 5.5 points — more than enough to win, but less than a third of the margin by which Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) took the state in 2012, and about two-thirds of the buffer that separated Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That purpling trend has been most pronounced in the state’s big urban counties but is also present in its still conservative, but increasingly competitive suburbs.
Analysis by KXAN has found that while suburban counties still lean red, 26 percent fewer suburban voters backed Trump in 2020 versus 2016 — even as the suburban population rose by 600,000.
And the Democratic vote share in the cities rose by two-thirds in the same period, from 562,000 in 2016 to 925,000 in 2020 — an increase that more than doubled the share of votes Democrats lost over that period in the state’s ever-redder rural counties, where populations are decreasing.
But those trend lines have not, so far, been enough to make the state competitive.
High turnout in urban counties is “a necessary condition for [Democrats] to be competitive, but it’s not sufficient,” Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project (TPP) at the University of Texas told The Hill, noting that increases in Democratic turnout have largely gone alongside rising turnout across the board.
While the overall trend may favor Democrats, surveys of likely voters show both Trump and Cruz solidly in the lead in Texas. A poll of 1091 likely voters released last week by the TPP found that Cruz was up 7 points over Allred, while Trump led Harris by 5 points.
But those numbers come with a caveat, Blank told NewsNation partner The Hill — they are drawn from likely voters, who in Texas tend to be older and whiter than the state as a whole.
In other words, they tell little about the behavior of the less-likely voters — the ones key to Democrats’ plans, and essential to any chance of statewide Democratic victory.
For all the polling, “we don’t know what the unlikely voters are going to do,” Blank said.
The narrowing gap separating Cruz and Allred in recent polling has fueled Democrats’ hopes that this election could represent a breakthrough for the party in Texas.
In a reflection of the tight race, Vice President Harris announced Tuesday that she would rally in Harris County on Friday with Allred — an unexpected stop in a whirlwind campaign tour largely focused on more traditional swing states, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, as The Hill reported.
What the election comes down to, Blank said, is Democrats’ ability to resolve a paradox: turning out voters who are hardest to turn out.
That points to the parties’ very different strategic needs, Blank added. “Republicans just need to make sure all their voters show up. Democrats need to find new voters who are unlikely to vote — and that’s just to remain competitive.”
