We’re almost at the halfway point in Texas early voting, and the numbers are looking great. We’ve passed 30% registered voter participation in: Travis, Collin, Denton, Williamson and Brazoria Counties, and are almost there in another four.
Out of just the top 16 counties, only THREE are at under 25% participation. However, that’s a problem when it’s El Paso, Hidalgo, and Bell Counties. El Paso especially is deep blue with a large population — for folks out there, please help GOTV! Texas is counting on you!
County |
18 Oct |
19 Oct |
To Date |
Voter % |
2016 Total ev |
2018 Total ev |
harris |
42,745 |
91,132 |
720,240 |
25.38 |
954k |
767k |
dallas |
25,884 |
47,328 |
392,724 |
28.09 |
542k |
494k |
tarrant |
11,345 |
48,657 |
324,374 |
25.83 |
508k |
434k |
bexar |
21,178 |
41,283 |
300,758 |
26.39 |
466k |
380k |
travis |
15,059 |
36,455 |
265,255 |
31.42 |
364k |
349k |
collin |
12,288 |
28,468 |
231,022 |
36.58 |
298k |
271k |
denton |
9,631 |
24,975 |
180,767 |
36.41 |
224k |
218k |
hidalgo |
4083 |
10,662 |
98,607 |
25.27 |
138k |
108k |
el paso |
5,008 |
12,984 |
114,825 |
23.48 |
146k |
130k |
ft bend |
0 |
36,699 |
176,756 |
28.92 |
212k |
187k |
montgomery |
0 |
19,385 |
95,424 |
25.78 |
155k |
125k |
williamson |
6,252 |
16,787 |
139,043 |
36.95 |
160k |
153k |
cameron |
2,241 |
4,889 |
38,942 |
23.86 |
63k |
51k |
brazoria |
3,509 |
10,061 |
77,171 |
34.44 |
99k |
83k |
bell |
4,475 |
6,139 |
42,272 |
19.6 |
67k |
54k |
nueces |
444 |
5,627 |
51,633 |
28.64 |
74k |
61k |
totals |
164,142 |
453,908 |
3.28M |
23.57** |
4.3M |
3.75M |
*Harris County’s in-person early vote totals weren’t on the TX SoS site yet, so their voting percentage is about 2% low.
**Voter participation total is the TOTAL statewide percentage of registered voters who have voted in the 2020 general election. My math skills aren’t up to figuring it out for just the top 16 counties.
Quick analysis
We don’t know what we need to win. There was an amazing diary up today by MichaelZapendowski that had some excellent analysis — if you haven’t yet, please go read it! My personal guess is that we need to see 10-11M votes total, including election day, to have a good shot at winning TX for both Biden and MJ. In 2016, the total vote was 9M — and we missed it by about 800k. So that’s our target — 10-11M voters.
TX early vote has traditionally been about 60% of the total, but I have no idea whether that’s the case this year, between increased early voting time and the pandemic. Given we’ve already passed 4.6 million votes cast statewide, we’re going to hit the ‘usual year’ target percentage fast. Like, Thursday, fast. This year, my guess is that we’re going to have about 70-75% of the vote cast early.
Based on my random guesses, if we want to get the presidency, we need to see about 7.7M votes prior to election day. Again, these are all guesses, but it’s something to start from.
That means we’re over halfway there. At 7 days down, 11 to go for the early voting period.
Keep up the vote! GOTV!
EDIT: lorell pointed out that I might have an error in how I’ve been tracking FBC mail-in votes. Thanks much! There are a number of counties I’ve really struggled to get good mail-in numbers for: only about 2/3 of the counties are tracking it in a ‘clean’ way to pull data, which makes it hard to make sure I’m grabbing numbers right — and the TX SoS (which regularly has different numbers than the counties directly) only tracks cumulative mail-ins. THANKS AGAIN and I’ll dig into it further over tonight and get it fixed!!