Early voting in Texas is witnessing a slight downturn this year when compared with the breakthrough numbers of the 2020 presidential race. With just over 2.8 million votes cast, either in person or through returned mail ballots, these figures represent 15.1% of the registered voters. This is a marginal decrease from the 15.7% participation observed during the same phase of the 2020 elections. Texas has seen a surge in registered voters, hitting a record 18.6 million, which is up by around 1.7 million from the 2020 roster, an analysis by the Texas Tribune indicates.
Hunt County, specifically, has seen 11,634 of its 73,383 registered voters show up to vote early in person, in addition to receiving 799 mail ballots by the same time frame. Residents in Hunt County looking to participate in early voting can proceed to Fletcher Warren Civic Center and Caddo Mills ISD Administration Building, with an extended availability for voters on the weekends, as reported by the Yahoo News. The national trend of increased early voting among Republicans, contrary to the 2020 election cycle when Trump urged voters to wait until Election Day, seems to be reflecting in Texas as well.
The decrease in early voting might serve as an ominous sign for Texas Democrats. "If I were a Democratic adviser, that would give me some concern," mentioned Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, in a statement obtained by the Texas Tribune. An additional layer of concern stems from the early voting data that suggests more Republicans than Democrats are turning out to vote based on their historical primary voting patterns. Derek Ryan, a political consultant to GOP campaigns, revealed that 1.1 million of the early voters had cast ballots in Republican primaries, as opposed to 715,180 from the Democratic primary camp.
The current data does not definitively color the whole picture; early vote counts can be incomplete due to the self-reporting nature by each county. The period for early voting in Texas this year has been cut down to two weeks as opposed to an extended three weeks in 2020, which was influenced by the pandemic environment that year. Despite the shifts in turnout patterns, Ryan expects the final turnout to land somewhere between the turnout of the 2016 and 2020 elections. "Both parties have a lot of work left over the early voting period and on Election Day to get some of the people who are probably solidly party voters but just may not be as likely to turn out," Ryan told the Texas Tribune in an interview. Whether this voter turnout slight dip signifies an impending pattern or is merely a blip in the electoral process remains to be seen as key election dates approach.
