So after shattering early voting records in an extra week of early voting, Texas’ first Saturday vote showed a significant drop-off. This isn’t abnormal, but it’s still something to see numbers go down by 125k votes for the daily total. It’s just another reminder of how big Texas really is.
The charts will come back tomorrow, but I wanted to do a quick drop!
To date, the top 16 counties in TX have...2.7 million votes so far. 2.7 million voters. Remember, the TOTAL early vote in 2018 was 3.75M votes across these same counties...and 2016 was 4.3M. STATEWIDE, we’ve hit 3.9M early and mail-in votes, for a total registered voter participation rate of almost 23%.
We’re getting there, quickly. Plus we’ve got another two weeks of early voting to go! Do we know what this will mean for election day turnout? Nope. Do we know what this will mean for Dem turnout? Nope.
My personal guess based on past years is that we need at least 10M votes total in TX to turn the state blue and grab the TX State House (which is KEY for redistricting). If we hit 11M votes, it’s ours, and less than 9.5M, and I think we’ll come up painfully short yet again. Of course, that’s just my opinion, but we know the GOP voters tend to vote.
Does this depend on demographic breakdowns staying the same? Mostly. GOP voters VOTE. We know that, year after year. The trick is that in 2020 we need to do two things: 1) GOTV. We need EVERY Democratic voter we can get from the youth, POC, etc. 2) convert the suburbs. This is critical to win those State House seats we need.
The good news is that the DCCC, DLCC, and Biden campaign are putting in money.
The bad news is that Texas...needs a lot of money.
The best news? Battleground TX and Beto are doing everything in their power, along with all of us on the ground, to get out those votes — and it shows!