![\"Democratic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1771869968_902_.webp\")
Democratic early voting is up by more than 211,000 ballots compared with the same point in 2022, according to state data. (Gabriel C. P\u00e9rez | KUT News)<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\tDemocratic early voting is up by more than 211,000 ballots compared with the same point in 2022, according to state data. (Gabriel C. P\u00e9rez | KUT News)<\/p>\n
Democratic early voting in Texas\u2019 primary election has surged compared to the last midterm cycle, with more than 211,000 additional Democrats casting ballots so far compared with the same point in 2022.<\/p>\n
Republican early turnout, by comparison, is up by about 6,000 voters over the same period, according to data from the Texas Secretary of State<\/a>.<\/p>\n Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, told KERA News<\/a> the spike in Democratic participation may reflect heightened energy in the party this year.<\/p>\n He said growing criticism of the Trump administration\u2019s policies, combined with a high-profile U.S. Senate Democratic primary between U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas<\/a> and Texas Rep. James Talarico of Austin<\/a>, has helped drive engagement.<\/p>\n \u201cDemocrats have generally not perceived that they had that great of a chance to win statewide office, and they haven\u2019t had especially interesting primaries,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cBut those two things aren\u2019t true this time.\u201d<\/p>\n As of Sunday, nearly 483,000 voters had cast early ballots in person or by mail in the Democratic primary, while about 446,000 voters had participated in the Republican primary. That amounts to roughly 5% of the state\u2019s 18,657,918 registered voters.<\/p>\n And overall participation is also running ahead compared with this time in the 2022 primary, when just over 4% of registered voters had cast early ballots.<\/p>\n Texas voters are choosing nominees for U.S. Senate and statewide offices including governor, lieutenant governor<\/a>, comptroller and attorney general<\/a>. Four seats on the Texas Supreme Court are also up for election, along with all 150 seats in the Texas House and 16 seats in the Texas Senate.<\/p>\n Early voting began Feb. 17 and runs through Feb. 27. Election Day is March 3.<\/p>\n KERA\u2019s Dylan Duke contributed to this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Democratic early voting is up by more than 211,000 ballots compared with the same point in 2022, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2133,2065,71134,223,2424,27,29,28,5686],"class_list":{"0":"post-176746","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-democrats","9":"tag-early-voting","10":"tag-mid-term-election","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-republicans","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-texas-headlines","15":"tag-texas-news","16":"tag-tx-voting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}