We have had two elections going on these past weeks. I’ve done my best to bring attention to the three HCAD elections, but they have gone on alongside the special election in SD15. While the stakes in that one are relatively low – both candidates would gladly trade winning tomorrow for winning on May 28 – it makes sense to me that the turnout for the HCAD elections is being driven in part by turnout for SD15. It’s an active campaign, and there are no others like it going on.
I wanted to check that, so I went and downloaded the voter rosters for the ongoing special election, to see how many votes were cast by people in SD15. For that to mean something, we have to compare it to something else, and the most sensible thing to use as a point of comparison is the 2022 election. I wanted to see what percentage of the total vote in each election was cast by voters in SD15. And once I got on that track, it was easy enough to do the same thing for all of the other Senate districts. I had the voter roster for the 2024 data and the precinct data for 2022, so off I went. And here’s what I found:
Dist 2022 2024
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SD04 8.52% 6.97%
SD07 23.82% 16.05%
SD11 8.53% 7.75%
SD17 10.23% 11.09%
SD06 11.66% 9.57%
SD13 11.29% 16.54%
SD15 22.45% 30.20%
SD18 3.20% 1.83%
GOP 51.10% 41.86%
Dem 45.40% 56.31%
The numbers here represent the share of the total vote cast in that district. For example, in 2022 there were 248,556 votes cast in SD15 out of 1,107,390 total votes in Harris County, which is 22.45% of that total. I then applied the same math for each Senate district in each election. I have them grouped as I do because the top four are Republican, the next three are Democratic, and for the tiny piece of SD18 that is in Harris County, in 2022 it was basically fifty-fifty. That yields the GOP and Dem percentages at the bottom, which are the sums of the top four and next three numbers in each column, respectively. Make sense?
The first thing to note is that my initial hypothesis, that turnout in SD15 was driving overall turnout in Harris County, was correct. SD15 is a much larger share of the overall vote in this election than it was in 2022. I’d be confused, and even more alarmed, if that were not the case, because it would suggest that Republicans are doing an unexpectedly strong job of turning out their voters for HCAD. At least based on that, I don’t think that’s the case.
However, we need to apply a few caveats here. One is that I’m comparing final vote totals in 2022 to early (including mail) vote totals in 2024. Democrats did better in early voting in 2022 than they did on Election Day, so if we assume that the larger share of the vote coming from Dem districts is good for the Dems, it may be somewhat ephemeral, depending on what Election Day turnout looks like. As I said before, I have no idea how that pattern will play out, and I’m not going to try to guess now. Point is, it is entirely possible that Republicans could make up ground on Saturday. We won’t know until we see the returns come in.
Let me digress for a minute to address the fact that more votes were cast in Republican districts in 2022 than in Dem districts. You may wonder, how can that be if the Dems still won nearly everything countywide? Very simply, because the Dem districts are a lot bluer than the GOP districts are red. Greg Abbott got 59% of the vote in (the Harris County part of) SD04, 58% in SD07, 61% in SD11, and 53% in SD17, but Beto got 67% in SD06, 80% in SD13, and 65% in SD15. The difference in degree led to the overall greater vote share for Dems in 2022.
Which again should be good news for the Dem HCAD candidates, especially with the significant lead Dem districts have this year, but that leads to caveat #2: Particularly in a low-turnout election, the partisan splits can vary greatly from what you might expect. I mean, SD15 is still going to be majority Dem, but maybe it and the other Dem district are five or ten points less blue, while the GOP districts are five or ten points more red. Think about all those special elections elsewhere in which Dem candidates have outperformed the 2022 and even 2020 benchmarks. We don’t know what the partisan splits actually are, so we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. One could do an estimate of the partisan mix with the use of various campaign datasets, but I don’t have that. This is what I do have.
Finally, while more people are turning out in SD15, it may be that a disproportionate number of them are only voting in SD15, as they had little knowledge of or interest in the HCAD elections. I can tell you as an SD15 resident that I’ve been blockwalked by HCDP volunteers pushing the HCAD elections, so there’s an effort to make sure it gets some attention from the one known pool of slightly more likely voters, but we don’t know how effective that’s been. Again, we’ll know more when we start seeing the returns.
So this is where we are. I will say, seeing these numbers made me feel a little better, like Dem efforts to get out the vote have borne fruit. I don’t know how effective that has been, and given the caveats I will try to keep my expectations modest. I would still much rather be in this position than one in which Republican districts were outpacing their 2022 numbers. That would make me very nervous. What I see here gives me a sense of tempered optimism. We’ll know more soon enough.
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