In early 2024, 9 million Texans voted. Here’s how that compares to previous years.

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Fewer Texans — especially in the state’s largest cities — voted early this year compared to 2020, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data.

More than 9 million Texans either voted in person during the two weeks of early voting or returned their absentee ballots by Nov. 1, state data show. That is 48.6% of all registered voters. In 2020, 9.7 million, or 57.2% of registered voters, went to the polls or cast ballots during the same period in 2020.

The slowdown is largely attributed to a dramatic decline in mail-in voting. About 8.7 million Texans voted in early 2020 and 2024. However, in 2020, 937,870 Texans voted by mail, while this year 347,652 voted by mail.

The current data is not definitive and may be incomplete. Counties can accept mail-in ballots until Wednesday. And each province is responsible for self-reporting, and in some cases provinces do not share their numbers or report late. And a direct comparison to early voting in 2020 comes with a major caveat. Texans had three weeks to vote in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and only two weeks this year. And four years ago, there was also an increased emphasis on mail-in ballots.

Election day is Tuesday.

Despite the slowdown in turnout, the total number of Texans who voted is staggering. Besides 2020, more people have already voted than the total number of people who voted in previous presidential elections, according to veteran consultant Derek Ryan, who publishes a must-read report on early voting.

Four years ago, more than 11 million people voted in Texas, a high for a state with one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the US.

It appears that Democratic turnout was lagging during the first voting period, a trend first noticed during the election first three days of early voting.

Harris County Democratic Chairman Mike Doyle said turnout was good, but it’s not shocking that the county had lower turnout this year than in 2020 because of the pandemic and the extra voting week. Harris County, which includes Houston, is the state’s most populous county.

“It does mean we have some ambitious targets for tomorrow,” Doyle said. “But we have been taking to the streets for quite some time now.”

Doyle is cautiously optimistic, saying a good day for Democrats would be around 300,000 voters. He added that they expect about half a million additional voters in Harris County on Election Day.

Democrats have hoped to target U.S. Senator Ted Cruz this year. the last attempt to end their decades-long streak of losing statewide elections. Texas’ rural and suburban counties have long been Republican strongholds that vote at higher rates than the state’s urban centers such as Dallas, Austin and Houston.

Ryan, a consultant to Republican campaigns, said Democrats would need an increase in turnout in the top five populated counties on Election Day to win a statewide election.

“President Biden got 59% in those five counties four years ago, but only got 25% of the vote in the state’s most rural counties,” Ryan said.

On Monday, 58 solid red provinces and six border provinces broke their 2020 turnout record. Zapata County, where about 8,000 people live south of Laredo, saw the largest increase in voter turnout: 14 percentage points.

No fast-moving counties, like Colin County in North Texas, or big blue counties, like Travis or Bexar, outperformed their turnout in 2020. In fact, the state’s largest counties all saw similar declines in their turnout rates, between 10 and 12 percentage points.

Solidly Republican counties have nearly matched their early voting totals from 2020, which could explain the trend that Republicans appear to vote early more than Democrats based on their voting history.

It’s something of a reversal from 2020, when former President Donald Trump questioned the process and encouraged voters to go to the polls only on Election Day. According to Ryan’s data, 2.5 million voters who cast ballots during the two weeks of early voting previously voted in a Republican primary. That compared to 1.6 million voters who participated in a Democratic primary. Texas does not track voter registration by party. The use of voting history in political party primaries provides a proxy during general elections.

“For the electorate so far, this cycle is looking very similar to what it did in 2020,” Ryan said.