Early Voting in the Texas Democratic and Republican Primaries

With the completion of early voting the Texas primary elections, we can get some idea of what voter turnout will be after Election Day on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. The Republican primary garnered, as usual, more voters than the Democratic primary, although one might have thought that with no real contest in the nomination of a presidential candidate in the Republican primary and a plethora of candidates in the Democratic contest to secure the presidential nomination, there would be higher participation rates in the Democratic primary.

So what were the levels of participation during early voting? In the Republican primary, 1,085,144 voters participated, which constitutes 6.69 percent of Texas' registered voters. In the Democratic primary, 1,000,288 voters participated, which is 6.17 percent of Texas' 16,211,198 registered voters.

How does this translate into a total participation rate for each political party? In most Texas elections, the early vote constitutes about 60 percent of the total vote cast. However, in the 2018 Democratic primary, that percentage was lower (54.81 percent of the total vote). If we assume that the early vote constitutes between 53 and 56 percent of the total vote cast, then the Republican primary total vote would between 1,937,757 and 2,047,442, and the Democratic primary total vote would be between  1,786,229 and 1,887,336. The actual voter turnout, with 99 percent of the vote counted, was 2,006,978 for the Republican primary election, and 2,076,046 for the Democratic primary election.

Derek Ryan, who lives in Austin and is a political consultant, publishes a very interesting report during early voting, gathering data from the 30 Texas counties with the largest number of registered voters. His data provide information about party, gender, and age of voters in the primary. Note who voted by previous election history and each party's voters by age and gender.