Texas 2026 midterm election: What do the early voting numbers actually mean?

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A week into early voting, Texas is seeing historic turnout for a midterm election. More than 4 million voters have already cast their ballots, with four more days of early voting and Election Day still to go.

What do the early numbers mean, if anything?

The late Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns… some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

And while that quote referred to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, it could as easily apply to the early vote.

Check out ABC13’s Early Vote Tracker here.

In Harris County, so far more than 620,000 voters have already gone to the polls—a little less than a quarter of registered voters in the county but significantly more than at this time in the last mid-term election.

That’s a little less than 23% of registered voters in the county. And that percentage is less than we’ve seen in Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, and Austin Counties. It’s also less than the percentage of registered voters statewide.

But the highest percentages in the state—where roughly a third or more of registered voters have cast their ballots include more rural counties across the state. So what does that mean?

ABC13 spoke with two well-respected political scientists in Texas about what we can glean from the votes, where they’re happening, and when.

“Certainly the reason that we see Vice President Vance and President Trump visiting rural areas all over the country, including in Texas later this week, is that Republicans thrive in rural areas,” SMU Political Science Professor Cal Jillson said. “They’ve got to make sure that the rural vote comes out. It should be 25% of total votes cast in Texas for Republicans to be comfortable, because they know that the suburbs are increasingly balanced, and that the major urban areas lean strongly Democrat.”

“One clear pattern that people should keep in mind is that Republicans are more likely, historically, to wait until Election Day to vote,” James Henson, Director of the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin, said. “And we’ve seen that increasing a bit in recent years with suspicions being cast, you know, largely for political reasons on mail-in voting and the increased sort of difficulty and moving around of voting locations for early voting. So I think we have to keep that in mind, too. I think we’re going to see a pretty big turnout on Election Day.”

And that is really the truth of it. We won’t know which way the wind is blowing until after we begin to see the exit polling on election night and we get the totals from early voting. Until then, there is a lot we don’t know.

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