Counting the early voting period, Texans had more than two weeks to vote in the May primaries. And when they voted, according to vote totals from the presidential races, appears to have depended on where they live and the primary in which they cast a ballot.
The state's big urban counties were split between early and election day voters. But there were wide differences across the state. These interactive maps show where Texas voters tended to show up early and where they waited until May 29. Overall, Democrats were more likely to vote early; 51.6 percent cast their ballots during early voting. Most Republicans — 52 percent — waited until election day to vote.
Bexar, El Paso, Collin, Hidalgo, Fort Bend and Denton were the biggest counties where early voters made up more than half of the combined primary electorate. But in some of the biggest counties in the state — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Travis — the majority of voters waited for May 29 to cast their votes.
Far more Texas voters showed up for Republican primaries than for Democratic ones; Republican voters accounted for 71.1 percent of the total vote. And in many cases, that means the overall turnout numbers — early versus election day, for instance — look more like the Republican primary.
The map below shows when voters cast their vote in the primary. Use the drop-down above the map to switch between the Republican, Democratic or combined view. Click on a county to see the early, election day and combined vote totals.
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Comments (3)
Marcus Denton
Ryan, although a 3.6% difference in early voting by political party is not nothing, in my opinion it seems to be a bit of a stretch to point it out with the implication that political party had an effect on early voting tendencies, at least without an adjective like "marginally" or "slightly" to act as a disclaimer. In fact, although Democrats overall were slightly more likely to vote early, when looked at geographically it appears that Republicans voted early in more counties than Democrats. Perhaps the "real" story here is to be found in the relationship between early voting and county population, county population density, or county partisanship.
Thanks!
Stephen J Wright via Texas Tribune on Facebook
This is interesting. Anyone have any explanations?
Stefan Haag
"For this map, we decided to approach this a bit differently. Instead of using the number of registered voters (a number that is prone to fluctuation and tends to make for a very inconsistent metric), we instead used each county's voting age population, current as of the 2010 U.S. Census.
When the number of registered voters is used to calculate the turnout percentage, it comes out to 15.5%. Using the number Texas citizens of voting age instead, it drops to 11.1%. "
Increasingly, political scientists are calculating voter turnout using Professor Michael McDonald's voting eligible population (VEP), which reduces the voting age population by the estimated number of ineligible residents (undocumented residents, felons, and paroles). Using that number, which McDonald estimates to be 15,915,758, voter turnout in the primary was 12.8 percent, which is still low but better than 11.1 percent.