At the end of early voting, I posted some totals from various counties around the state. I noted at the time it was an imprecise comparison since I included final 2018 turnout numbers as the comparison point for 2022 and said I’d update that table when voting was over. Well, voting is over, so let’s return to that table and see what we can see.
County 2018 Dem 2018 GOP 2022 Dem 2022 GOP
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Bell 7,282 18,149 9,089 20,912
Bexar 81,408 67,977 94,334 87,277
Brazoria 10,085 24,376 11,331 30,541
Brazos 5,131 12,365 4,611 16,430
Cameron 14,123 4,003 19,705 10,504
Collin 34,669 66,078 36,368 79,431
Comal 4,150 17,662 4,847 23,874
Dallas 123,671 80,583 126,203 86,551
Denton 27,025 49,474 27,340 68,104
El Paso 54,184 12,096 37,017 18,240
Ellis 4,243 15,906 5,376 18,536
Fort Bend 29,322 34,707 39,613 45,582
Hays 11,397 11,881 12,972 15,475
Hidalgo 37,739 7,050 37,309 15,042
Johnson 2,618 12,280 2,485 17,085
Lubbock 5,900 21,964 5,599 27,552
Maverick 6,300 111 6,653 623
Montgomery 9,701 48,921 10,585 71,451
Nueces 12,345 12,553 13,426 18,871
Smith 4,704 22,826 6,362 27,668
Starr 6,729 15 3,410 1,089
Tarrant 71,876 105,317 73,410 129,628
Travis 113,070 39,177 108,831 46,416
Webb 21,137 1,426 17,675 2,963
Williamson 25,681 35,675 26,067 47,431
The first thing you might notice is that the final numbers for Starr and Maverick counties are less than the final EV totals I had. How can that be? I double-checked the final EV totals on the SOS webpage, and they are now as they were then, 6,895 for Maverick and 5,188 for Starr. I may not know much, but I know that election totals go up, not down. How do I explain this?
I went and looked at the Starr County Elections page to see what I could find. What I found is that the turnout numbers they presented for the Democratic and Republican primaries are indeed different than what the SOS reported for the gubernatorial races, by a fair amount. While there were 3,410 votes cast in the Governor’s race on the Democratic side in Starr, and 1,089 on the Republican side, total turnout for Democrats was given as 6,456, with 1,444 as the total for Republicans. You can see if you scroll through that some races, like the CD28 Dem primary, got a lot more votes than the gubernatorial primary. I figured maybe the action was a bit heavier downballot, and that seemed to be true on the Dem side in that there were a lot more votes cast in the eight Justice of the Peace races. There were still undervotes, which were easier to comprehend as they were a lot closer to the “total votes” figures for each race, but if you added up all the votes in those eight JP precincts, you get the 6,456 and 1,444 figures cited.
Make of that what you will. The transition from the “actual total turnout regardless of who voted in what race” to the “total that actually voted in this race” was jarring, in this case because the undervote rate was so low. I have no idea what it might have been in 2018, so I can’t draw any conclusions. As for Maverick County, I couldn’t find a report from their website, just what the SOS had. Insert shrug emoji here.
Anyway. I didn’t have an agenda for this post, just an intention to keep the promise made before. I’ve got some other posts about primary voting in the works and will run those in the coming days.
Several of those counties in the valley will have turnout that votes only for downballot contests. By a wide margin. Same can happen in the General. Sometimes, it will go as low as school board contests that outpoll a Gov contest.