Early Votes in Texas Suggest a Big Swing to Democrats Led by Hispanics

Here’s new analysis of the final early voting count in Texas.

7.7 million Texans Voted Before Election Day

Early Vote Totals

• 2026 midterm election: 7.72 million
• 2024 presidential election: 9.05 million
• 2022 midterm election: 5.49 million
• 2020 presidential election: 9.7 million
• 2018 midterm election: 4.88 million

That’s down 14.7 percent from the 2024 presidential election, but up 40.6 percent from the last midterm election.

Please consider A Record Early Vote In Texas

Early voting came to a close in Texas on Friday, October 30. According to the Secretary of State’s website, over 7.7 million Texans cast their ballot in-person or via mail. That amounts to a little over 40 percent of registered voters, which is just above the early voting threshold in 2018.

And at least fifteen counties have posted early voting totals surpassing their entire turnout in 2022. That includes the sizable counties of Williamson, Denton, Collin, Fort Bend, and Hidalgo.

According to data scientist Tom Bonier, over 760,000 early voters in Texas did not vote in 2024. And while Texas does not have party registration, Texans who voted in the Democratic primary in 2026 are edging out those that voted in the Republican primary.

With approximately 48 hours until the close of Election Day, candidates throughout the state are fanning out for the last dash before Tuesday. On Saturday, James Talarico’s campaign announced they were kicking off “final four” campaign ground operations with 454 events in 106 cities with 60,000 volunteers.

Texas Hispanic Vote Estimates

• We’re up to 763,307 early voters in Texas who didn’t vote in 2024 so far. Including 367,329 Hispanic voters.
• Oh, and 64% (78,391) of these Gen Z Hispanic surge voters are women.

Tom Bonier’s Bio

CEO @thetara_group, Sr Advisor @TargetSmart, former @HowardU,
@claritycampaign, @ncec1948., @SEIULocal500. DM inquiries. tombonier.substack.com

My Questions to Grok

Grok, is there a way to confirm these numbers, not just projections of data?

If not, are the projections reasonable?

Grok on the Stats

What can and cannot be confirmed

• Overall early vote totals are solid. Multiple trackers compiling Texas Secretary of State (SOS) county reports show roughly 7.6–7.7 million early ballots (in-person + mail) by the close of in-person early voting on October 30, 2026. This is a midterm record, well ahead of 2022 (~5.5 million early) and surpassing prior midterm highs. Numbers were still updating with remaining mail ballots as of early November 1. texastribune.org
• The “didn’t vote in 2024” count (763,307 in the post you linked) comes from matching. Public early-vote participation lists (who cast a ballot) are matched against commercial voter files that track historical voting. Firms like TargetSmart (where Tom Bonier is a senior advisor/CEO of related work) do this routinely. The raw matching of “voted early in 2026 but has no 2024 presidential vote history” is based on actual records and is feasible. The state does not publish this exact aggregate breakdown in real time, so there is no independent official confirmation of the precise 763k (or the earlier ~642k figure). Bonier has noted that in 2022, about 7.2% of Texas early voters had not voted in 2020; the non-2024 share this cycle is higher (~10% of ballots so far in his analysis). @tbonier
• Race/ethnicity (and some other attributes) are modeled estimates. Texas does not record race or ethnicity on voter registration files. The 367,329 Hispanic figure (and the full breakdown in the post’s chart: ~48% Hispanic, ~30.5% White, ~13% Black, ~8% Asian, etc. for those 763k) comes from commercial modeling — typically Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) or machine-learning approaches using surname, geography, and related data. Age (e.g., the under-30 share) and gender are more directly available from birthdate and other file fields. These models are standard across the industry (used by Democratic and Republican data firms, campaigns, and even in some voting-rights analyses), but they have known individual-level error rates and potential biases; large aggregates are more reliable, especially for Hispanic identification in Texas via surnames, but they are not official counts.

The image attached to Bonier’s post is a table from his data system showing exactly that modeled race breakdown of the 763,307 non-2024 early voters.

Are the Numbers Reasonable?

Yes, as directional analyses within the limits of the methods. They are not pure projections of final turnout; they describe people who have already voted early, with vote-history matching (relatively solid) plus demographic modeling (standard but imperfect).

• High overall early turnout is independently confirmed and is a midterm record.
• Elevated “surge” (non-prior-presidential) voting, especially among younger and Hispanic voters, aligns with Bonier’s broader early-vote reporting this cycle comparing shares to 2022 and 2024 baselines. He has published charts and notes showing Hispanic early-vote strength, driven in part by younger voters.
• He has explicitly cautioned against overreading it: Democrats start in a significant hole in Texas, and while the composition of the early electorate is more favorable than a pure high-propensity baseline might suggest, it does not guarantee an easy win. Early vote is not a forecast of final results or candidate preference (Texas has no party registration, and models of partisanship are separate). @tbonier

In short: the total early-vote volume is confirmable and high. The non-2024-voter count is a data-firm matching exercise on real records (reasonable but not publicly audited by the SOS in that form). The Hispanic/age/gender splits are modeled estimates of the kind used industry-wide — useful for trend analysis, not gospel or official statistics. Independent public confirmation of the exact demographic numbers is not available from state sources. Similar analyses from other firms sometimes differ in the details due to different models.

Hispanic Turnout is Booming

This post is from October 29, before early voting concluded. Please consider Hispanic Turnout is Booming

Hopefully you’ve heard by now about how Hispanic voters are turning out at massive rates in the early vote around the country. I first noticed the huge increases in turnout on October 5th.

This trend has persisted. Hispanic turnout is surging around the country. I’ve posted about this a fair amount already, so I’ll spare everyone a rehashing of all that I’ve shared, beyond this brief summary: the increases are happening almost literally everywhere; in 96% of counties across the country the Hispanic share of the early vote is larger than it was at this same point in 2022. And it is being driven by younger Hispanic voters, especially younger Hispanic women. Somewhat incredibly, we’ve found that, in many states, younger Hispanic turnout has been exceeding presidential year turnout (comparing to the same point in the 2024 election). One of the most striking examples of this has been Texas:

Hispanics under the age of 30 have not only exceeded their total turnout at this point in 2024, they have almost doubled it. pic.twitter.com/LsQg39oqVq

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) October 24, 2026

What’s interesting to me is that this explosion in Hispanic turnout is happening even while there are underlying partisan differentials among Hispanic voters.

That is to say, Democratic and Independent Hispanics are driving the big increases in turnout, while Hispanic Republicans appear relatively demotivated.

In the 2024 election, Hispanic voters notoriously swung towards Republicans, one key element of Donald Trump’s victory. Looking at the above chart [click on above link], you’ll see that, at this point in the 2024 early vote, Hispanic Republican turnout was ahead of that of Hispanic Democrats in 10 of 17 states with party registration and a critical mass of Hispanic population. In retrospect, this was an early predictor of GOP successes with Hispanic voters in 2024.

Fast-forwarding to today, Democratic Hispanic turnout is surpassing that of Hispanic Republicans in 17 of 17 states. When we look at the swing in turnout differentials between 2026 and 2024 at the same point in the election cycle, we see massive numbers in key states – North Carolina is leading the way with a 14-point margin swing towards Democrats, followed by Florida and Nevada.

It’s also worth noting that Hispanic Democrats are turning out at an above-presidential rate in several states, including Kansas, Nebraska, and New Jersey, all states with key races that could determine who controls Congress.

We’ll keep tracking this through election day, but at this point it is safe to say that Hispanic voters, especially younger women, and Democrats overall, are highly engaged, and poised to make a difference in many key races.

Note on the underlying data – many states do not provide self-identified race/ethnicity on their voter registration files. In those cases we use modeled data, relying on a combination of commercially sourced data, and surname matches. Note that, among the states in the analysis cited above, NC, LA, and FL all provide self-reported race/ethnicity on their files (and comprise 3 of the top 4 Hispanic turnout surge states)

Reason to Be Optimistic

Next, please consider Tom Bonier’s article from October 31, Cautionary Tales

With just a few days remaining before Election Day, as I obsess over early voting data in every corner of this country, there’s something that’s emerging in the turnout data that I believe deserves attention, even past election day. And that’s whether Democrats win by historic proportions, the results are closer than expected, or Republicans somehow defy history (and just about every available indicator to date).

We’ve got to do something about partisan registration.

In November of 2023 I flagged a troubling trend of more young men registering as Republicans than Democrats:

Following up on what I shared earlier today, these tables show partisan registration shares by current age, by gender. Somewhat surprisingly, more men age 18-20 are registered as GOPs than Dems. Meanwhile, women Dems in that age range outnumber the GOP share by 24 pts! pic.twitter.com/hECVIbfKND

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) November 10, 2023

I wrote about this a fair amount at that time, and briefed various operatives within the party as well. As I dug deeper, it became clear that, while the issue was more pronounced with young men, the Democratic Party in general had a voter registration issue, while Republicans were investing heavily in registering more voters.

Fast-forwarding to the 2024 election, while there are many things we can point to that went wrong for Democrats (I shared my immediate thoughts here and then in various places over the months to follow), one very relevant issue was the party registration gap.

One stat I discovered and shared once we had the vote history from the battleground states that I think about often: if you look at the partisan turnout differentials between 2020 and 2024 in the 4 battleground states with party registration, the differential was less than 1 percentage point. Meaning Dem turnout wasn’t exactly the issue. Yet, the Democratic share of the electorate dropped by much larger margins in every state. Why? Because the Dem share of total registration had dropped between 2020 and 2024 in literally every state.

The 2026 Election

As I’ve been sharing here and elsewhere over the past few weeks, there are plenty of indicators that should inspire optimism among Democrats. The early vote turnout is strong, with large increases in turnout among voters of color, especially younger voters (and younger women more than any group). The polls look great. The crowds are there. Everything is lining up for a strong election performance.

Yet, with all of that, the party registration problem persists. And while Democrats can still have a very good election night despite this deficiency, if one thing will keep me up for the next few nights, it’s this. And, as I said at the top of this piece, even if Democrats enjoy historic margins and victories on Tuesday, this is an issue that will need to be addressed before 2028.

Let me give you an example or two. Start with Maine.

Look at early vote turnout as a percent of registration, by party, compared to the same point in 2022. Honestly, it couldn’t look better for Dems, with turnout running 12 points ahead of ‘22, while GOP turnout is only 6 points ahead of their benchmark. That looks like a Blue Wave election.

But, there may be a problem here.

Registered Democrats are actually accounting for a smaller share of the early vote, relative to the same point in 2022, despite having much higher turnout. The GOP turnout share is down too, but by a much smaller margin. So, at this point in ‘22 the electorate was +26 Dem, and right now it is +24 Dem.

Now, an important point here is that the decrease is being offset by increases in unaffiliated voters. And we know that these voters, even though they are more likely to identify as independents, are also more likely to vote for Democrats (in this moment in this election). In 2024, the opposite was true. These voters tend to be lower information, and more likely to vote with the majority.

For what it’s worth, Maine isn’t the only place we’re seeing this. This is visible, to varying degrees, in many party registration states. Take Iowa, where the Dem turnout advantage has gone from +10 to +13, yet their share of the vote has dropped from +19 to +13.

Note: Bonier remains cautious. I agree to a degree. Nothing is certain.

Twenty-five percent chances are 1 out of 4. They happen.

Maine and Iowa

There’s my two top concerns again, Maine and Iowa. And I was not aware of this interesting point until now.

This time, I think anti-Trump sentiment will be enough to carry the day in Maine.

But I have been skeptical of Iowa all year.

All Trump Has Is Lies

“I would’ve won The Vietnam War in a week. I would’ve won the war in Afghanistan.”

The lies are getting so ridiculous, not even MAGA can believe them.

Questions of the Day

Seriously, does Trump actually believe this nonsense will win votes?

Here’s an even better question: Does Trump even know what he is saying?

Texas Goes Blue

I am increasingly confident Texas goes Blue.

I will go with 80 percent.

And if Texas is 80 percent, then the odds of Democrats winning the Senate are no less than 80 percent.

It would be a real hoot if the vote surge against Paxton sinks Governor Abbott.

And this anti-Paxton plus Hispanic surge can easily do that. Call it 40 percent or so. I will do a report separately.

Why I Am Confident

Look at the New York Times Texas cross tabs.

• 61 percent of those who did not vote in 2024 are breaking Talarico. Only 21 percent for Paxton.
• 59 percent of independents are breaking Talarico. Only 29 percent for Paxton.
• Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio/South all breaking Talarico.
• 73 percent non-white no college are breaking Talarico. Only percent Paxton.
• Age Group 18-29 breaking 72 percent to Talarico. Only 23 percent Paxton.
• Women breaking 56 percent to Talarico. Only 38 percent Paxton.

Those are pretty damning stats. They don’t even all need to be correct. Women alone can sink Paxton.

My Favorite NYT Anecdote

Rey Gonzales, a 62-year-old Republican living in Houston, said that he had been troubled by the allegations that led to Mr. Paxton’s impeachment and by reports that he had been unfaithful in his marriage. Mr. Gonzales, who says he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but did not vote in 2024, says he plans to support Mr. Talarico purely out of dislike for Mr. Paxton.

When asked what he liked about Mr. Talarico, his answer was succinct: “Nothing.”

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