I’m not going to keep track of what day number we’re at now, as it doesn’t really make sense anymore. But what we can do right now is have a look at how each party is doing with mail votes. Here’s a quick comparison to March, with primary data for the entire early voting period, and runoff data through Sunday:
Election Mail Early Total Mail %
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D primary 114,886 886,336 1,001,222 11.5%
R primary 91,415 987,744 1,079,159 8.5%
D runoff 153,239 155,101 308,340 49.7%
R runoff 81,421 131,142 212,563 38.3%
These are just early voting totals – there were still a bunch of votes cast on Election Day, all of which were of course in person. Dems did quite well with absentee ballots in the primary, which I would attribute largely to efforts in the big counties. About 28K of those Dem mail votes came from Harris, for example.
That was all done without a big push to get people who are eligible to vote by mail to do so. In the runoff, everyone has heard a lot about voting by mail, and everyone has concerns about their own safety voting in person. It’s not a big surprise then that the number of mail ballots has surged, in relative terms for both parties and in absolute terms for Dems; I expect Republicans will surpass their mail total from March as well this week. Other counties are carrying a bigger share of the load for Dems – while Harris made up almost 25% of the total mail ballots for Dems in March, they’re at about 21% so far in the runoff. I don’t have numbers from other counties but my understanding is that over 90% of the Harris mail ballots are coming from the 65 and over crowd, so it’s mostly people taking advantage of something that was already available to them. And good for them, because that’s exactly what they should be doing. I hope that continues right on through the end of the week.
As for where we are now in Harris:
Election Mail Early Total Mail %
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D primary 16,651 44,339 60,990 27.3%
R primary 18,949 39,207 58,156 32.6%
D runoff 34,782 29,978 64,760 53.7%
R runoff 21,409 8,691 30,100 71.1%
The Monday runoff EV file is here, and the final EV turnout report from March is here. If you’re thinking “Hey, this looks like higher turnout for a party primary runoff than what we’re used to seeing”, you are correct. I will discuss that in more detail next time.
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