Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

After five days of early voting for the runoff elections in the Democratic and Republican primaries, only 3.22 percent of Texas’ more than 15 million registered voters had cast ballots. The numbers are not impressive. The secretary of state’s office usually provides early voting information on the 15 counties with the largest number of registered voters, but for the runoff, the number of counties was increased to 30. Since the Republican Party had no runoff election for any statewide office, there were only 22 of the 30 counties that held runoff elections for Republicans. However, on the Democratic side, with a runoff in the gubernatorial contest, all 30 counties held Democratic runoffs. The chart displays the total ballots cast as a percentage of registered voters in the 30 counties. The 11,793, 711 registered voters in the 30 counties account for 77.3 percent of the 15,249,541 registered voters in Texas. In the Democratic runoff election, 1.19 percent of registered v...

Derek Ryan, Ryan Data in Austin, Texas, provided a report on the voters in Texas’ 2018 primary election. I have copied some of the charts and tables and created an additional chart for commentary. Source : Ryan Data Considering who voted in each party’s primary, nearly four-fifths of Republican primary voters were voters who had previously only voted in Republican primary elections. On the other hand, about two-thirds of Democrats were voters who had previously only voted in Democratic primary elections. For Republicans, just over one-tenth of primary voters were first-time primary participants. On the other hand, just over one-fifth of Democratic primary voters were first-time primary participants. Furthermore, only 2.2 percent of historical Democratic primary voters switched to vote in the Republican primary election. Meanwhile, 4.6 percent of historical Republican primary voters switched to vote in the Democratic primary election. Another table in Ryan’s repor...