Texas Early Voting Ends With a Harris County Record: More Than 1,081,000 Ballots as Talarico Leads Paxton in a New Poll
Early voting closed Friday with a midterm record in Harris County - more than 1,081,000 ballots, over a third of the county's registered voters - and nearly 7 million ballots statewide, as a CNN poll puts James Talarico ahead of Ken Paxton 49 to 43 in the Senate race that may decide control of the chamber.
HOUSTON - Texas early voting is over, and Harris County did not just beat its midterm record - it ran past a million ballots doing it. Early voting, which ran from October 19 through Friday, drew more than 1,081,000 voters in Harris County, more than a third of the county's registered voters and a midterm turnout record, Newsmax reported. Statewide, nearly 7 million of Texas's roughly 19 million registered voters had cast early ballots as of Friday, a figure expected to rise as more counties report.
The scale is national as well as local. More than 50.5 million Americans had voted early by Saturday morning, according to the University of Florida Election Lab analysis reported by The Guardian, and more than 7 million of them were Texans - already about 1.5 million above Texas's entire early-voting total from the 2022 midterms. An Associated Press analysis put Harris County at 862,700 ballots by Wednesday, against 564,500 at the same point in 2022.
The composition of the vote is what has some Republicans worried. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican, told The Washington Post that GOP voters are lagging: 'The Republican deep bench has not turned out as much as their Democrat counterparts have.' Steven David, a nonpartisan voting analyst and former chief operating officer for the city of Houston, extrapolated party from voters' primary history - Texas does not register voters by party - and estimates Republicans need about 54 percent of independents statewide to win.
The Senate race those voters are deciding has tilted toward the Democrat in recent public polling. A CNN poll of 923 likely Texas voters, conducted by SSRS online and by telephone from October 20 to 27, found James Talarico at 49 percent and Ken Paxton at 43 percent, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points; other recent surveys show the race tied or separated by less than the margin of error, The New York Times reported. Elon Musk has given $158 million to groups backing Paxton, according to the Times, and Paxton recently canceled several stops on his final tour in heavily Republican areas, which a campaign spokeswoman attributed to scheduling conflicts with visits by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
What is left is Election Day itself. Republicans and right-leaning independents could still show up in force on Tuesday, David noted, though a cold front is expected to bring rain statewide. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas in three decades. Harris County vote centers are open Tuesday, November 3, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and any registered county voter can vote at any center in the county.
