Texas Early Voting Breaks the Midterm Record at 40.5 Percent, and Rural Turnout Jumped Nearly Seven Points
More than 40.5 percent of registered Texas voters cast early ballots, passing the 2018 midterm record of 39.9 percent - and rural Texas drove a share of the surge, with early turnout up from 28.8 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent.
Texas did not wait for Election Day to break its record. Preliminary figures from the Texas Secretary of State, reported Monday by The Daily Yonder, show more than 40.5 percent of the state's registered voters cast early ballots in the 2026 midterms - passing the previous midterm record of 39.9 percent, set in 2018. The count combines mail ballots received as of Nov. 1 with the ballots cast during the in-person early voting period.
The detail inside the record is rural Texas. Early turnout among rural voters reached 35.6 percent, up from 28.8 percent in the 2022 midterms - a jump of nearly seven points. Metro turnout rose even further, from 31.4 percent to 41.2 percent, but the rural rise continues a pattern that has run all year: in the March primaries, rural voters posted the highest turnout rate of any geographic group in the state, about 26 percent against 24 percent in the major metro counties. Texas also added more than 1,369,000 registered voters between the 2022 and 2026 midterms, and 9.5 percent of those new registrations came from rural counties.
The surge arrives with a counterweight for Tuesday. A CBS News Texas I-Team investigation, cited in the Yonder's report, found that Texas has lost more than 500 Election Day polling locations since 2018, with decreases reported in 130 of the state's 254 counties. Election officials attributed the decline to limited facility availability and to the expansion of countywide voting, which lets a voter cast a ballot at any polling place in their county - but fewer sites can still mean longer drives for rural voters on the day itself.
What it means for the state's two marquee races - James Talarico against Ken Paxton for the Senate, and Gina Hinojosa's challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking a fourth term - will not be known until the early vote is counted Tuesday night. What is already known is the shape of the electorate that produced it: bigger than any midterm electorate in Texas history before Election Day even opens, and more rural than the last one.
