After record early turnout, who’s left to cast ballots?
Experts, consultants predict between 200K and 400K voters in Harris County will go to the polls on Tuesday
Harris County crushed early voting records, both in number of votes and as a share of the region’s ever-growing registered voters.
With 9.7 million ballots already cast across Texas — more than 1 of 7 of them in Harris County — will anyone show up Tuesday?
Well, yes, political scientists and consultants agree, though their estimates of the expected turnout vary.
County voters have already matched the 58 percent total turnout of the 2004 election and are just short of the 61 to 63 percent turnout recorded in the last three presidential contests. Statewide, 57 percent of registered voters have cast ballots.
The Harris County Clerk’s Office expects 200,000 to 300,000 voters to turn out Tuesday. Two Democratic consultants expect about 350,000 — in line with the last two general elections. Two local political scientists think 400,000 is possible, though they differed on whether the higher tally would benefit Democrats or Republicans.
The lower estimate would produce a final tally of about 1.6 million votes, or 66 percent turnout. The higher figure would push turnout close to 75 percent, which would be a modern record, exceeding the 72 percent turnout posted in 1992, when Houstonian George H.W. Bush lost a tough re-election fight to Bill Clinton.
GOP political consultant Kevin Shuvalov expects a more modest mark, saying, “It’s going to be bigger, but we’re not
going to have 2 million voters.”
Still, he added, “Looking at who’s left over, there’s a lotof reliable voters still out there who have participated inmultiple general elections previously. And then you have a large chunk of voters they just really like to vote on Election Day. They’re traditionalists.”
Democratic consultant Robert Jara echoed that, noting thatmany older voters are in the habit of casting their ballots at the same nearby Election Day polling place.
“There’s a sense of community, really, of voting in your neighborhood,” Jara said.
Local Latino voters have also disproportionately voted on Election Day in the past, Jara said, noting that Democrats tend to get an Election Day boost from predominantly Latino east side precincts.
It’s no secret that early voting has been embraced by ever-growing numbers of voters since its introduction inTexas in 1988. A majority of votes have been cast before Election Day in every presidential and gubernatorial cycle in Harris County for 14 years.
Still, some voters have their reasons for waiting for Election Day.
Enrique Huerta said he almost always votes in person on Election Day, typically at a church near his homein Trinity Gardens.
“I like towait tomake sure I make a sound decision,” Huerta said in Spanish.
For some voters, Election Day functions as a deadline.
Keliy Anderson-Staley was in Marfa for most of October
participating in an artist residency programwhile her two children attended Houston ISD classes virtually.
The photographer and her husband considered voting absentee for Democratic nominee Joe Biden but worried that method would be less reliable than voting inperson, so Anderson-Staley made the 10-hour trek across Texas on Sunday.
Anderson-Staley sometimes chooses to vote onElection Day anyway, “wanting to be part of the excitement and the energy.” But she deliberately alternatesbetween Election Day and early voting, aiming to make her ballot a data point thatwill encourage county leaders to keep a full slate of polling places open during both periods.
“I’m very, very excited that
Houston seemsto be doing so well in terms of early voting and 24-hour voting, but I do worry that if that takes over there will be less polls open on the day of,” she said. “It’s sort of a psychological game of not wanting to be consistent, to think that you’re helping the system be more flexible.”
Even if Election Day producesonly a fractionof the total votes, political scientists and consultants said, all votes are important. Theriseof early voting simply means that “election day” now lasts weeks. In a sense, that’s helpful, as campaigns’ modeling identifies the best voters to target, and each new day of county voting data reveals who has yet to cast a ballot.
“The more voters you get in the can, so to speak, the
fewer you have to focus on either persuading or turning out for your candidate,” Democratic consultant Keir Murray said. “It makes the job of the campaign actually easier because you can narrow the focus.”
Jara agreed. “Beforewe only had a oneday shot at it,” he said. “Now we know exactly who hasn’t voted and we can bother them endlessly.”
But it’s also expensive to fund turnout operations for weeks on end, particularly if the campaign is high-profile enough to require TV ads. That was especially true this year, Shuvalov said, giventhat Gov. Greg Abbott added an extra week of early voting in the hopes of reducing lines and therefore the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“It’s certainly put the pressure on them,” said Renée Cross, the senior director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. “If you have a threeweek window where people are voting … you really have to get your efforts out even earlier.”
For groups trying to encourage low-income voters to make their voices heard, however, the extra time is unequivocally helpful.
At the Texas Organizing Project, Executive Director Michelle Tremillo and her staff pull the county’s voting rosters to aid their voter targeting efforts just as campaigns do. And this fall, TOP began texting each of its voters who cast ballots to thank themfordoing soandaskthat they urge three family members to follow suit.
For work that often involves convincing residents wary of politicians’ promises that voting matters, Tremillo said the newly Democratic county’s investment in expanded polling sites and hours helps her staff link voting with government policy decisions.
“We havemore days to encourage people to go vote,” she said, “andwe can point to a Harris County leadership that is giving the same message thatwe are, which is that our vote matters.”