AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Nearly seven million Texans have already voted — nearly a third of all registered voters in the state — and their voting histories suggest Republicans are turning out much more than Democrats.
As of Monday, 1,894,070 early voters had previously voted in Republican primaries and have no history of voting in Democratic primaries, according to Ryan Data and Research. A total of 1,242,800 early voters had only voted in previous Democratic primaries. That history suggests those voters came into the voting booth with a strong partisan lean, though it cannot definitively predict which candidates they prefer.
Based on the data, analysts believe that Republicans have an early vote lead of about 1.1 million votes.
“If that number sounds large… it is large. That is much more than we’ve seen in previous elections,” Dr. Ross Hunt with the Republican consulting firm Murphy Nasica said. “A lot of this has to do with building up numbers over time… every day that passes, that vote remains net Republican. It was at least 7% net Republican yesterday. The Republicans just continue to add to their lead.”
The biggest share of voters, however, are those who have either voted in both parties’ primaries or have no primary voting history at all — those voters total up to more than 2.3 million.
Republicans make up about 45% of the early vote while Democrats make up about 29% and Independents 26%, Hunt said. He expects the margins to tighten as we get closer to polls closing, but the trends so far are a good sign for Republicans.
“No one has a crystal ball,” he said. “It is always possible that we will see a wave of Democratic turnout come in and correct this trend. But we don’t really have a reason to believe that right now.”