Early Voting Data Is Everywhere. What Can It Actually Tell Us?

By Nikki McCann Ramirez

Nikki McCann Ramirez

Midterm election anxiety is running hottest in the heart of Texas — and the political class is doing everything it can to glean insight into how things are going to turn out in the state’s key races. 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are facing formidable challenges from insurgent Democratic opponents: Gina Hinojosa is vying to unseat Abbott as governor and James Talarico is running against Paxton for U.S. Senate. Both have outperformed expectations to bring their races closer than any Texas Democrat has been to winning statewide office since Beto O’Rourke’s run for Senate in 2018. Election Day is a week away, but early voting is well underway, with millions of Texans already having cast their ballots.

Early voting data is providing pollsters, analysts, and commentators some electoral tea leaves to make bold, sweeping proclamations of doom and fortune. So far, the early voting period — which lasts from October 19 to October 30 — has seen record-breaking turnout that, at least for now, seems to favor Democrats. Early turnout in Dallas and Travis counties, both key to the party’s chances, is exceeding expectations compared to Republican strongholds. Hispanic voters are turning out in droves, a potential indication that Republicans have shed many of the gains made within the demographic in 2024. Democrats also currently hold a narrow lead over Republicans in terms of turnout among voters who only participated in primaries for a single party.

We don’t know who early voters actually cast their ballots for — those will ultimately be counted the day of the election — but analysts can use comparative voter and demographic data from past elections to guesstimate where things might be leaning. Still, the real story on the ground is difficult to parse. All that’s clear is that Texas is going to come down to the wire. 

It was always going to be this way, despite months of Democratic optimism. The myth of a blue Texas has been disproven time and time again, and despite changing demographics, the state is still a Republican citadel. Yet, for the first time in decades, Democrats have a very real chance of winning a Senate seat in Texas, and have a planets-have-aligned shot at winning the governorship, too. Trump’s approval has sunk to historic lows, leaving Republicans to battle the growing tide of backlash. Paxton — whom Trump helped push through a runoff primary against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn — is a historically weak candidate. Like many Republicans in Texas, he is banking that the hard math of the state will carry him into the Senate — yet he has trailed Talarico in the vast majority of polls. Abbott, historically popular in his own state and adept at fundraising and retail politics, is in a better position, but struggling with the anchor of Paxton and Trump’s popularity drag.   

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Everyone is attempting to present the available early voting data in the light that best reflects their prospects, but some electoral statisticians in Texas want everyone to calm down. 

“There are more people fucking around with this data right now than literally ever before,” Jim Henson, founder and executive director of the Texas Politics Project — a non-partisan data research hub at the University of Texas at Austin — tells Rolling Stone. “There’s enough ambiguity here that I can see why both sides are spinning it the way they are.” 

“I think the most Democrats should be right now is cautiously optimistic,” he adds. “I wouldn’t go much further than that … I don’t think you can be rock solid sure based on what we’re seeing in the public data.” 

Chuck Rocha, a Texas native and founder of the Democratic political consulting firm Solidarity Strategies, is optimistic about the early data, pointing out “polls that have been very favorable toward Democrats, polls and focus groups that show a return of disgruntled Latinos — voters who voted for Trump — coming back,” and how Republicans and independents are really mad about gas prices.  

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“The biggest single thing that’s been happening is Latinos in Texas are voting at presidential levels,” he adds. “Democrats are showing up in force, not because many of them are falling back in love with Democrats — it’s just Democrats have done a really good job reminding voters that the Republicans are the ones that fucked this up.” 

Still, Rocha cautions about reading too much into polling and early voting data. “Polls are just polls,” he says. 

There’s also the possibility that Democrats are not actually over-performing, but instead cannibalizing their Election Day ballots by spreading them across the early vote. Republicans remain confident that the opposition is once again getting ahead of their skis. 

“You can only vote once. And it doesn’t matter when you vote, it’s who votes,” Dave Carney, a longtime Texas Republican strategist and campaign consultant to Abbott, tells Rolling Stone. He argues that Democratic enthusiasm this cycle isn’t translating to a large influx of new voter registrations in a state where voters have long preferred Republicans. There’s not a large contingency of new “never voted before” voters showing up, or voters “that have been on the rolls and just got awakened, and so I feel good,” he says. 

Carney has gotten the governor through less-than-ideal cycles in the past — particularly alongside contested Senate races leading the ticket such as in 2018. While Paxton has struggled to cement a lead over Talarico at any point this cycle, Abbott has consistently held a narrow lead over Hinojosa. “You would always like everyone above you to be doing better — no question about that,” Carney says. “But you know, in [2018], Ted Cruz and Beto were running above us. We’ll see this time.” 

“I think everyone would like everyone to be running a rocket ship campaign and doing really well, being way ahead, so we could do the playlist for Election Night,” he adds. 

Derek Ryan, founder of Ryan Data and Research, which produces daily reports on the state of the vote in Texas, says the numbers currently available might look very different by the time we get to Election Day. “Typically the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of the last week of early voting see larger numbers than the first few days,” he says. “Right now what we’re monitoring is whether Democrats are running out of votes. Did they frontload in those first few days?”

Ryan notes that those who run to the polls at the starting gun tend to be the party’s most reliable voters, and that the coming days will be critical to determining what downstream mobilization actually looks like. More than two-thirds of Texans take advantage of early voting. Ahead of this past weekend (where a surge of ballots were expected), only about 20 percent of the state’s pool of registered voters had cast a ballot. “I would really expect to see some big numbers put up towards the end of this week.” Ryan says. 

Those numbers will also be critical to determining what kind of last-minute pushes — and how much money — Democrats need to dump into the state to pull off wins. High early voting for Democrats helps Talarico and Hinojosa in the sense that Republicans have a massive spending advantage. Any vote they can theoretically bank up early means more money for strategic spending on turnout efforts in the final days of the race. 

“It’s saving them so much money because those are people that they don’t have to contact to get them to turn out and vote anymore. They can spend more of their resources focusing on those smaller pockets that haven’t voted,” Ryan explains. “Whereas on the Republican side there’s still so many that haven’t voted that a) there’s some concern, but b) it’s money that has to be spent making sure that they do show up.” 

There are still major factors that won’t be measurable until the race is called and researchers have a chance to dig into post-election polling. Did the $158 million money dump from Elon Musk on Republicans’ behalf manage to move the needle? Will the barrage of anti-trans, culture war-focused ads being deployed throughout Texas have the same effect now — under a completely different set of electoral factors — as it seemed to in 2024? What percentage of expected Republican turnout flipped or split their ticket? The big unknowns overshadow all of the available data. 

The stakes for Republicans are incredibly high. Should Paxton lose, Democrats would, for the next six years, hold a formerly reliable GOP Senate seat. Should Talarico or Hinojosa lose, the narrowness of the race is still a signal to Texas Republicans that their era of electoral comfort could be coming to an end. 

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