6,282,318 Texans Had Voted by Friday Morning — and the Biggest Bloc Has No Primary History at All
As early voting closed Friday at 7 p.m., the running count stood at 6,282,318 Texas ballots, Harris County was headed past 1 million, and voters with no recent primary history — 35.4 percent — were the largest single bloc in the electorate.
The final early-voting picture in Texas came into focus Friday. As of Friday morning, 6,282,318 Texans had cast their votes, according to the running count carried in Texas AFT's last-call early-voting report, read in full this cycle and attributed there to the state elections count it cites. In Harris County, more than 862,000 people had voted before polls opened on Thursday morning, the Houston Chronicle reported, and Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth predicted that 1 million voters will have cast a ballot in Harris County by the time early voting ends on Friday. Early voting ended Friday, October 30, at 7 p.m.; Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.
The composition of the early electorate is the detail election watchers will carry into Tuesday. Voters with only a Republican primary history lead voters with only a Democratic primary history, 31.4 percent to 30.4 percent — a far narrower gap than in the 2024 election, when the Republican-primary-only bloc led by about 7 points at the same stage. The biggest bloc of all, at 35.4 percent, has not voted in a Democratic or Republican primary in the past six years, which the report reads as a sign that voters without a party-primary record are motivated to vote in these midterms.
Turnout alone does not say how anyone voted, a caution the report itself carries: there is no way to know from participation counts how ballots were cast, and the totals say nothing about which candidates the surge helps. What the numbers do settle is scale — more than 6.28 million ballots banked before Election Day in a state deciding a U.S. Senate race, a governor's race, and every U.S. House seat, with the remaining voters now headed for a single day of voting on Tuesday. (Texas AFT is an education advocacy organization that endorses candidates; this story carries only the turnout data its report cited from the Chronicle and the elections count, not its endorsements or arguments.)
