Early voting numbers are down in four major North Texas counties relative to the midterm elections in 2018.
Within the first eight days of early voting, Dallas County saw 229,341 voters cast their ballots, as opposed to 331,461 voters within the first eight days of early voting in 2018.
Here are the comparisons for the four major North Texas counties:
| Dallas County | Tarrant County | Collin County | Denton County | |
| 2018 | 331,461 | 249,770 | 190,209 | 145,116 |
| 2022 | 229,341 | 231,920 | 152,955 | 133,830 |
Collin County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbert said 2018 was “an anomaly of an election. It was more tracking like a presidential turnout. We set all kinds of records in that election.”
This year, lower turnout could be good news for incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, according to some political analysts.
“Abbott’s strategy really focuses on getting out the vote in small town and rural Texas and a real emphasis on the border counties,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “O’Rourke has focused on the urban areas, some of the cores in Dallas, Houston, etc. He also put a lot of emphasis on turning out the youth vote.”
Other analysts believe this election could still see historic voter turnouts similar to 2018 and 2020 and that a Republican victory in the gubernatorial election is improbable.
“When we see low turnout, electorates, we tend to assume that we’re going to see a generally pretty standard election,” said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project. “When we start to see turnout tick up and get higher, it’s not that we think that necessarily benefits one party or the other, but it tells us that we can’t be certain exactly what the outcome is going to be as more and more Texans cast ballots.”
Blank maintains that despite Abbott’s lead in polling among likely voters, the incumbent is “unlikely” to win.
“No votes count until votes are counted, but when we look at the sum total of the state-wide polling to date, it seems pretty unlikely that Governor Abbott is going to walk away with a victory on November 8,” he claimed.
A poll conducted by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Government suggested that Abbott’s lead over O’Rourke continues to expand, finding that the incumbent had a 13-point advantage over the challenger.