Yesterday’s diary wound up exploding with attention and comments — if you’re here after that one, thank you SO much for stopping by and commenting!
Today and tomorrow, I’m not planning on lots of charts just because the weekend tends to be slow...and slow, Saturday was.
Across the state, we went from 6.86M votes to...7.17M votes. Which actually isn’t bad to see 300k on a Sat. Today will be slower because of reduced hours and some counties don’t even have Sun voting. My guess is that tomorrow we’ll be seeing just a bit over 7.3M.
Still, that’s over 7 million votes cast...and we’ve got a full week of early voting left.
A quick set of back-of-the-napkin estimates
First of all, some facts. We were seeing between 330k and 400k votes a day last week in the Top 16 counties, and about 450k-550k across the state. If we keep that same rate, even on the low end, that would be adding in another 2.3 million votes, and putting early vote at somewhere north of 9.5 million.
HOWEVER, there’s more to consider.
Traditionally, the highest early voting days are the first two days of the period...and the last two. If we see the same kind of jump on the last two days of early voting as we do in a normal year? We could be looking at something over 10M, possibly even up to 10.5M on the outside. Which would be absolutely insane.
My personal assessment: We’re going to see the early vote jump from the ‘expected’ 60-65% of total Texas vote to something in the 70-80% of the total vote. So, let’s look at the range.
We could see anywhere from 9.5M to 10.5M early votes, and that is anywhere from 70-80% of the total TX vote.
That means we could expect a final TX vote count to be 11.9M-13.5M total votes if we’re starting with 9.5M early votes to something up around 13.1-15M votes if we’re starting with 10M.
Do I think we’ll see 15M votes in Texas? No, I don’t. We’ve got 17M total registered voters, and I think an 88% turnout is unrealistic.
Let’s look at the bottom end, though. If we have right at 11.9M votes, that’s a turnout of 70%. 13M total votes is a turnout of 76%. Do I think THOSE are possible? Yes. I think it’d be impressive and due to concentrated, unified GOTV around TX, but it’s possible.
Benchmarks to look for
We want a blue Texas. Travis County managed to get 97% of eligible voters registered, so let’s run up the margins here. Same with Harris, Bexar, Dallas, El Paso, Hidalgo, and Cameron Counties. But those aren’t enough.
Williamson County went for Beto in 2018, and that’s N of Austin. Think ‘Tech mecca’, it’s where Round Rock (and thus, Dell) are located. We need this.
Houston Collar: That’s Ft Bend, Brazoria, and Montgomery — and in that order I think are how we can look at those. Ft Bend went blue in 2018, and is part of how we had our broader victories. We need to keep it blue and aim for Montgomery either going blue or being within 5.
DFW: Tarrant, Collin, and Denton Counties are those we’ve gotta work on. Collin County’s the one Beto said to watch. It went to Cruz by single digits in 2018, so here’s where we need to pull the margin down to low single digits — or turn them blue. Denton and Collin Counties are seeing absolutely bonkers turnout, so this might be all the folks who didn’t bother to vote before coming out.
Other benchmarks? We need the ‘under-30’ to be high, as well as the ‘first time voter’ to be high. Right now, those are both running at rates near DOUBLE 2016 rates. That’s an amazing sign of hope for us.
Can we do it?
Yes.
We can turn Texas blue. Right now. This year. It’s not easy, but Battleground Texas, League of Women Voters, and thousands of boots on the ground have been doing the hard work the past decade to make 2018 possible: that’s when people realized that Texas wasn’t ‘beyond hope’ or whatever nonsense, but had people who believed in helping each other and making the impossible, possible.
Thanks to those organizations doing the forgotten work, Beto had the shoulders of thousands to stand on, and he used it along with his own brilliant campaign to get the attention of the nation and outperform polls by 4.6%. It’s up to us to take it this next step. If we do it, if we pull those collar counties to Team Blue…
We can get the Texas State House.
We can get a Junior Senator from Texas.
We can get more judgeships, more school boards.
We can get the Presidency.
We can set everything up to take the Governorship and Lt. Governorship in 2022.
Opportunities to help:
There are going to be GOTV efforts through every County — please look up the Democratic Party there!
GOTV with Biden
GOTV with Beto