Texas Early Vote, Read Closely: The Tracker Models a Republican +8 Party Lead - and Says Paxton Needs Election Day to Break Redder Still
Texas does not publish the party of its early voters, so On Point Politics models it - and its model of the 5,105,300 ballots cast as of Wednesday puts the early electorate at R +8.0, even as its own Senate forecast still favors Talarico by a point.
The headline number of Texas early voting is the count - 5,105,300 ballots cast as of Wednesday, October 28, 223,221 by mail and 4,882,079 in person, from state election office data collected by civicAPI, as this station reported this morning. The number underneath it is an estimate, and the On Point Politics tracker that publishes it is explicit about that: Texas does not publish the party of its early voters, so On Point Polling models the party mix from county results and voter demographics. On that model, the early electorate so far breaks Republican +8.0.
Read against the tracker's own benchmarks, that modeled lead is not, by itself, a Republican win signal. The tracker says the early vote would need to stand at R +11.7 for Republicans to flip its Senate forecast to even, and at R +21.9 for Republicans to beat the forecast by five - it is 3.7 points short of the first mark and 13.9 short of the second. Its forecast still favors Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton by 1.0 point, at a 57 percent win probability. The same page puts the composition plainly: its modeled early voters voted Democratic +10.6 in the 2024 presidential sorting it uses, while the Election Day voters it expects lean Republican - and it calculates that if the early vote ends where it is pointing, Paxton needs Election Day voters to break R +12.4 to win, 3.1 points redder than the R +9.3 its forecast expects of them.
The pace underneath the modeling is not modeled at all: the 5,105,300 ballots are 93 percent of the entire 5.51 million early ballots cast in 2022, a pace of +13 percent, with three early-voting days still to run through Friday, October 30. Early voters in the tracker's model account for about 54 percent of the electorate it expects, leaving Election Day - Tuesday, November 3 - as the remaining 46 percent.
The discipline for readers is the one the tracker itself states: these party figures are estimates built from a model, not counts of how anyone voted, and Texas ballots themselves will settle the Senate race. What is verified is the turnout - more than 5.1 million Texans have already voted, and the final three early days plus Election Day will decide what that turnout means.
