When it comes to voting, citizens do not always go to the polls with the same enthusiasm.
In 2022 45.8% of registered voters in Texas cast a ballot for governor, down from 66.7% who voted for president in 2020, according to records from the Secretary of State.
Those were good years. Pew Research Center found that the last three elections had the highest citizen participation in decades with 66% turnout among eligible voters at the national level for the 2020 race. (Turnout among registered voters was about 73% nationally in 2020.)
Voter turnout is much lower in local and primary elections, such as the one in March that drew 12.94% of Democratic voters and only 5.47% of Republicans, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
A recent Pew Center survey found that 56% of U.S. registered voters were “extremely” motivated to vote in the coming presidential race, and an additional 16% were “very” motivated. That poll was conducted shortly before former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear in an assassination attempt, and President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“But now, with everything that’s happened in the last weeks, it’s hard to predict,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center.
As Texas’ population has grown, so has its voter base. The total number of registered voters has grown to 17.9 million, up 45% since 2000, according to the Secretary of State.
It is less certain what role Hispanics, the state’s largest demographic group, will have in the election.
Estimating electoral participation by race and ethnicity is a challenge because election agencies only release general turnout statistics.
“But what’s unavailable is the racial, ethnic or even the gender or education backgrounds of those voters, because the state of Texas doesn’t ask about these factors in its voter registration form,” Lopez said.
Florida, North Carolina, and Alabama are among the states that ask for these statistics because of past voting rights violations, Lopez said. Research institutions then resort to surveys to estimate racial participation; the census also releases estimates.
According to Census data, more than 6.4 million Hispanic citizens over 18 live in Texas, second only to California with 8.5 million. Nationwide, an estimated 11.8 million Hispanics voted in November 2022 out of a total of 31.1 million in the country, or almost 38%.
In Texas, the white population of voting age continues to be the majority at 9.3 million, even though for all ages, Hispanics are already the majority group in the state.
“It is an important trend to keep in mind, because a lot of that growth comes from young Latinos turning 18,” Lopez said.
In the 2020 elections, nationwide, 59% of Latinos voted for Biden and 38% for Trump, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center. But because the Latino vote tends to be unpredictable, the final preferences of Texas Hispanics in this November’s elections are still up in the air.