People gather at a campaign rally for Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on March 2 in Houston.
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Danielle Villasana/Getty Images
In another positive sign for Democrats in this midterm election year, close-to-final turnout numbers in Texas show the Democratic Senate primary had the highest number of people voting in it than for any other primary for statewide office in Texas’ history.
More than 2.3 million votes were cast in the primary in which state Rep. James Talarico defeated U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Nearly 2.2 million Republicans voted in this year’s Senate primary, which is headed for a runoff between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
That eclipsed the 2.2 million who voted in the 2024 Republican Senate primary.
But 2024 was a presidential year, and the ballot included a nominally competitive primary between President Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The only other Texas primary elections that topped this year’s Democratic primary were presidential primaries — not for statewide office: about 2.9 million voted in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, and about 2.8 million voted in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
Both of those elections featured hotly contested races — in 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a drawn-out primary campaign, and in 2016 with a dozen well-known Republican candidates, including Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and home-state Sen. Ted Cruz, who won it.
Democrats see heavy shifts in their favor in Latino-heavy counties
The turnout record is another indicator of Democratic enthusiasm in these midterm elections, as polling shows the party with an advantage on who’s more interested in voting in this election and on who voters are saying they’d prefer to be in charge of Congress.
Also giving Democrats hope in Texas is the large shifts in their favor in counties with sizable Latino populations. In 2024, Trump won a record number of Latinos for a Republican candidate, and his success included many heavily Latino counties in South Texas.
But compared to 2024’s Senate primary, Democrats this year saw significant gains with the group, according to an NPR analysis of data from The Associated Press and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. In the 10 most populous counties in the state that are also at least 50% Latino, votes in the Democratic primary increased by an average of 128%. The Republican primary in those same counties saw an average drop in votes of 4.8%.
Trying to answer the biennial question about Democrats and Texas
Primary success doesn’t always equate to general-election victories, and Democrats have gotten their hopes up about Texas many times in recent elections — only to be repeatedly disappointed.
Democrats are looking to put Texas on the map in a longshot attempt at winning control of the Senate this year. And there is reason for the hope. Texas’ demographic changes in recent decades, particularly the increase in Latinos and Asian Americans, have made it a state where whites are in the minority. It’s one of only seven states considered “majority minority.”
That’s led to the question of when or if Texas would turn blue.
But demography is certainly not destiny, because the state has been something of a white whale for Democrats. Despite those trends, no Democrat has been elected statewide in Texas since 1994.
The only race that was even close in the last 30 years was the 2018 Senate race when incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz beat upstart Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke by less than 3 points. O’Rourke ran again for governor two years later — and lost handily, by 11 points.
Notably, Democratic turnout in this year’s primary was more than double both of the 2018 and 2022 primaries, but the winning vote total in the general elections in those years averaged 4.3 million — 2 million more than the Talarico-Crockett primary.
