Texas voter registration surges again

Texas has once again shattered voter registration records, adding more than 1.5 million voters since the last presidential election.

Texas now has surpassed 16.6 million voters, according to the latest numbers announced Tuesday by Texas Secretary of State Ruth R. Hughs. And there are still almost two weeks to add more.

“Ahead of the November election, I encourage all eligible Texans who have not already done so to register to vote by Oct. 5 so that they can help shape the future of the Lone Star State,” Hughs said.

In the four previous presidential election cycles, Texas added about 700,000 new voters on average — less than half as many as have been added this cycle.

That fast growth in voters adds another wrinkle to Texas politics that already have

been shifted by the pandemic. Campaigns don’t know how those voters are going to break or even if they are going to show up to vote at all, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor.

“It brings a lot of uncertainty,” Rottinghaus said.

That includes guessing whether they’ll show up by Election Day. It’s much harder to mobilize first-time voters and get them to the polls, Rottinghaus said.

The surge of voters comes as political experts begin to question if Democrats can break a decadeslong slump in Texas. No Democratic presidential candidate has won Texas since 1976, but recent polls suggest President Donald Trump is in a tight race to keep Texas from former Vice President Joe Biden. The last two public polls of Texas voters show Trump holding a 2 percentage point lead over Biden with early voting getting underway in three weeks.

Nobody doubts that the Democrats have gained ground in the last four years. Republicans acknowledge that while the GOP was counting on a more organic growth of voters, Democrats and their allies were aggressively adding voters at a faster clip. The result was Democrats flipping 12 seats in the Texas House in the 2018 midterm elections, along with two congressional seats.

Over the last two years, the GOP has responded by being more aggressive in its own voter registration programs, upgrading its candidate recruitment efforts and improving its fundraising.

Still, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has told Republicans in Texas they need to brace for another tough battle like nothing they’ve seen before. He said the Democrats who showed up in Texas in 2018 are fired up again and even more determined to take out Trump.

“Texas is a battleground,” Cruz told supporters on a conference call last week.

Texas does not require voters to pick a party to register. But voter registration growth in various regions has given both Democrats and Republicans cause to be optimistic going into November.

About one-third of the new voters since November 2018 come from three counties: Harris, Travis and Bexar — all deeply blue since 2016. That has Democrats convinced that they are adding to their base of support.

But for Republicans, voter registration has been surging in places such as Bell, Williamson, Denton, Collin and Montgomery counties — suburban communities that Trump carried in 2016.

The surge in voter registration over the last four years is even eclipsing the state’s population growth. While Texas has seen its population grow an estimated 5 percent in four years, voter registration has increased by over 10 percent.