O’Rourke helped to fuel voter turnout

The claim: “Young voter turnout in early voting was up 500 percent. We won more votes than any Democrat has in the history of the state of Texas.”— Beto O’Rourke, in an interview with CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert.

PolitiFact ruling: True.

O’Rourke’s assertion about young voter turnout is backed up by an analysis of state election data by the firm TargetSmart. And he’s correct that no Democrat has ever won more raw votes in a Texas statewide election than he has, an accomplishment achieved through a combination of his own electoral success, a pro-Democratic environment in 2018 and Texas’ rapid population growth in recent years.

Discussion: O’Rourke may have lost his U.S. Senate race in 2018, but he still sees something to crow about. The data available on TargetSmart’s website include final figures for 2018. It lists 118,383 Texans between the ages of 18 and 29 casting early ballots in the 2014 general election, compared with 674,027 casting early ballots in 2018.

The 2018 figure for early voting was about 5.7 times higher than the figure for 2014, and that’s close to the sixfold increase that would equate to a 500-percent bump.

The increase was a smaller — though still substantial — 200 percent once votes on Election Day are included in the tally. But in the interview with Colbert, O’Rourke was clear about the metric he was using.

Other data from 2018, from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, found that the rate of overall youth turnout in Texas — not just early voting — roughly tripled over 2014. That’s even higher than the increase found by TargetSmart.

The Tufts study found that O’Rourke saw his biggest levels of support in counties with high proportions of young voters, especially Latino youth.

A footnote: O’Rourke hired TargetSmart to work on data projects, but the data cited here was from a publicly released, 50-state project the firm undertook, not something that O’Rourke paid for or had influence on.

The part of his assertion about winning more votes than any Texas Democrat is also correct, though O’Rourke benefited from the state’s fast-growing population.

We looked through vote totals for Democratic nominees who ran statewide in recent elections — presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, attorney general and other statewide offices.

In general, as the table shows, Democrats ran especially strong in Texas in 2018. It was a good year for the party nationally, and O’Rourke’s candidacy ended up being unusually popular among Texas voters.

Even though presidential-year turnout is usually higher than

midterm-election turnout, no fewer than seven Texas Democrats won more votes in 2018 than Barack Obama did in either of his presidential runs in the state. The 2018 nominees who accomplished this were those for attorney general, lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner, railroad commissioner, comptroller, land commissioner and governor.

Of course, all these 2018 candidates, including O’Rourke, were blessed with running after Texas’ population had expanded dramatically.

Texas has “seen its number of registered voters increase more than fivefold over the past 55 years, from 3 million in 1964 to 7.7 million in 1990 and 15.8 million in 2019,” said Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist.

Still, O’Rourke beat them all, becoming the first Texas Democrat to win 4 million votes or more in a statewide election.