Harris County Judge Ed Emmett falls in a Democratic wave.
County smashes off-year numbers with more than 1.2M
Voters surged to the polls Tuesday and set a new benchmark for midterm elections in Harris County and Texas, smashing offyear turnout records and pushing the county past its turnout in two of the last three presidential-year elections.
The Harris County Clerk’s Office had recorded more than 1.2 million ballots by midnight, with more than 350,000 coming on Election Day to build on early voting and absentee turnout of 855,711 that had already set a midterm county record.
The atypical turnout for a midterm — when far fewer people usually vote compared to presidential years — was driven at the
top of the ticket by Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, who beat Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by 16 points in Harris County but lost statewide.
The high turnout and solidly blue result in Harris County likely does not represent an outlier, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.
“It’s tough to tell, but I think this is more a harbinger of an increasingly blue Harris County,” Jones said. He said that Harris County’s fast-expanding Democratic electorate is growing quicker than its Republican one, meaning that high turnout points to positive results for Democrats.
Robust turnout came despite an Election Day filled with myriad problems in Harris County. Malfunctioning voting machines caused some polling sites to open later than the uniform 7 a.m. start time, while others opened with a fraction of machines functioning.
A state district judge ruled in favor of two civil rights groups seeking an extra hour of voting at several polling locations where voters reported problems with long lines and faulty voting machines.
Fueling Harris County’s voting surge was a sharp uptick in turnout among young voters, driven primarily by progressive backlash to President Donald Trump and the unusually competitive Senate race, election experts said. Latino voters also turned out in numbers that broke records for early voting, surpassing ballots cast in previous midterm and presidential elections.
The turnout handed doubledigit Harris County deficits to a handful of statewide Republicans, who ultimately won statewide. “The less popular statewide Republicans, such as Ted Cruz, (Attorney General) Ken Paxton, (Lt. Gov.) Dan Patrick and (Agriculture Commissioner) Sid Miller have very serious races on their hands,” Jones said early Tuesday evening. “And while they may pull out a narrow victory, this represents a very loud wake-up call for the state Republican Party.”
Meanwhile, a slate of competitive congressional races also drove up turnout in pockets of Harris County, including in the 7th Congressional District, where GOP Rep. John Culberson lost to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher. The Houston Republican was seeking his 10th term.
Candidates running in the nine congressional districts that touch Harris County spent a collective $37.4 million from the start of 2017 through Oct. 17, an analysis of Federal Election Commission records found. That total far outpaced the $13.9 million spent in those same races in 2016, and did not account for millions more in outside spending and some $6 million candidates had left to spend by midOctober. Early voting data from the county clerk’s office also showed Hispanic voters made up a share of the Harris County electorate typically seen in presidential years, far higher than in midterms. This year, Latinos made up 17.3 percent of the early vote, coming close to their 22 percent representation on the county’s voter roll, according to the Harris County Clerk’s Office.
In addition, Harris County simply had far more registered voters than in previous elections: The county added more than 120,000 voters to its rolls from 2016 and a net total of more than 260,000 from the previous midterm, the largest raw increase among Texas’ 254 counties.
Yet Harris County saw a massive turnout rate, too. The incomplete and unofficial total of about 1.2 million votes by midnight moved Harris County past 50 percent turnout. Zach Despart, Rob Downen and Olivia P. Tallet contributed to this report.