What Texans Can Expect on Election Night

Texas is booming, adding nearly 4 million new residents over the past decade and gaining two U.S. House seats. It’s also becoming younger and more diverse, making the midterm election another test of whether Texas’ rapidly changing demographics will shake up nearly 30 years of GOP power.

Republicans aren’t running up the score in Texas like they were a decade ago. But they still have a leg up, and national headwinds for Democrats and President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings are giving the GOP even more of a boost after getting a few scares in 2018 and 2020.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has focused his bid to become one of Texas’ longest-serving governors on economic anxieties and record migration coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Democrat Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman who became a party phenomenon in 2018 after nearly ousting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, has animated supporters outraged over the Uvalde school massacre and a new statewide abortion ban. But Abbott has animated voters over the border issue, and Democrats have found themselves scrambling to protect their turf in South Texas.

Republicans are poised to keep a commanding majority in the Legislature.

All eyes in U.S. House races are on South Texas, where Republicans have redoubled efforts after the GOP nationally made gains with Hispanic voters in 2020. Republican Monica De La Cruz and Democrat Michelle Vallejo are running in the 15th Congressional District that is drawing heavy attention from both parties.

Also on the border is an unusual race between two sitting members of Congress: Republican Rep. Mayra Flores, who won a special election this summer to become Texas’ first Republican Latina in the House, and Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who switched districts to run in the redrawn 34th district.

Embattled Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is under FBI investigation and faces separate securities fraud charges, is seeking a third term against Democrat Rochelle Garza, a civil rights attorney.

Here’s a look at what to expect on election night:

ELECTION NIGHT

Polls close at 7 p.m. local time. Most of Texas is in the Central Time Zone and three counties in West Texas are in the Mountain Time Zone.

HOW TEXAS VOTES

Texas was the first state to offer in-person early voting in the 1980s and its popularity has steadily grown. While voters can still cast a ballot in person on Election Day, fewer are doing that today. In the 2020 general election, a record 87% of all ballots cast came during the early voting period.

The key counties are in the state’s metropolitan areas — Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso — including the growing suburbs that encircle the cities. Democrats typically dominate the urban centers of Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Travis and El Paso counties, while Republicans dominate the suburban counties like Collin, Denton, Fort Bend and Montgomery. The only metropolitan county that has been a toss-up in recent elections is Fort Worth’s Tarrant County.

Outside the metro areas, most counties tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican except for some along the Rio Grande Valley. Those in the southern tip of Texas tend to vote mostly Democrat. The GOP-led state Legislature has shaped the congressional districts in that part of the state to include slices of the San Antonio suburbs, which tend to vote Republican, to try to outweigh the votes in the predominantly Democratic counties to the south.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I KNOW?

Q: WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE PRIMARY?

A: Changes to mail voting rules in Texas led to the state rejecting at least 23,000 ballots outright during the primary, a rejection rate of roughly 13% that is far beyond what is typical. State elections officials say they’ve made efforts to educate voters after many expressed frustration and confusion over the additional requirements.

Q: WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE THE PANDEMIC ELECTION OF 2020?

A: In addition to the mail ballot changes, Texas Republicans also passed also sweeping new restrictions that banned drive-thru voting and 24-hour polling locations. The tighter rules were squarely aimed at undoing expanded voting options in booming Harris County, which includes Houston, a stronghold for Democrats.

Q: WHAT DO TURNOUT AND ADVANCE VOTE LOOK LIKE?

A: The Secretary of State hasn’t made a turnout projection. During the last midterm elections in 2018, which had the same races on the ballot except for a contested U.S. Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke, the turnout was 46.3 percent of registered voters. If turnout for the first two days of early voting is an overall indicator, it will be down. In 2018, there were nearly 1.2 million votes cast during the first two days, while this year it was at 549,611.

Q: HOW LONG DOES COUNTING USUALLY TAKE?

A: Most of the votes are typically counted within 4-5 hours of polls closing statewide, with remaining votes verified over the following days. Unless a race is too close to call, most winners are determined by 1 a.m. CT. In fact, in the 2020 general election, more than half of all votes counted were released within 75 minutes of polls closing statewide.

Texas can count quickly because so much of the state votes early, and counties with 100,000 people or more are allowed to start tallying early votes once the early voting period ends — this year that’s Nov. 4 — which gives them a head start. Counties with less than 100,000 can start counting when polls open on Election Day, but with the smaller populations, many still manage to count all early votes by the time polls close.