The pattern remained consistent till the end.
Nearly 116,000 Harris County residents have made their selections in next week’s primaries through early voting and returns from a record batch of mail-in ballots.
In all, 90,489 people voted in person at select polling stations open May 14 through Friday and 25,469 mail ballots were returned.
Possibly spurred by a hotly contested U.S. Senate race and a presumed-but-not-final presidential candidate, twice as many Republicans showed up to vote in person – 60,347 – compared with 30,142 Democrats.
Republicans also greatly outpaced Democrats in the number of mail-in ballots requested and returned.
More than half of the ballots mailed to voters in both primaries were returned. GOP voters returned 17,734 of 23,584 sent while Democrats tendered 7,735 of 13,087 ballots requested.
You can see the daily totals here. I’d argue that the GOP primary for District Attorney also drove turnout. To a smaller extent, their contested judicial primaries helped, too; if nothing else, it’s that many more countywide candidates working to get people to the polls. Most of the Democratic action, with a couple of exceptions, is in individual districts, and the two open seat legislative races are in districts with lower CVAP shares. Frankly, all things considered, I don’t think turnout is particularly bad here. If a bit more people vote on Tuesday than did during the early period, turnout will be right at 2004 levels, which is about where I thought it would be. We’ll see how it goes.