Texas Primary Voter Turnout: Party Split, Early Vote, Runoff Drop

Nearly 4.5 million Texans cast ballots in the March 3, 2026, primary elections, pushing Texas primary voter turnout to roughly 24% of the state’s 18.66 million registered voters and setting a new high for recent midterm primary cycles.¹ That is a sharp jump from the 18% who voted in 2022 and the 17% who voted in 2018. For the first time since 2020, more Texans pulled a Democratic ballot than a Republican one.

How the Parties Split the Vote

Texas does not publish a single official statewide primary turnout figure on election night, so the U.S. Senate primary is the standard benchmark. By that measure, at least 2.3 million voters participated in the Democratic primary and roughly 2.2 million in the Republican primary.² The Texas Secretary of State put registered voters at 18,657,918 going into the election.³

Democrats finished about seven percentage points ahead in total participation, reversing the pattern from 2022 and 2024. The growth was uneven between the parties. Democratic turnout more than doubled compared to the 2018 and 2022 midterm cycles.⁴ Republican turnout stayed roughly flat: about 1.96 million votes, compared to 1.957 million in the 2022 primary.⁵

Early Voting Set Its Own Record

More than 2.5 million Texans voted during the early voting period, outpacing early vote totals from any recent midterm or presidential primary cycle.⁶ Democrats cast about 1.49 million early ballots, Republicans about 1.34 million, a gap of roughly 150,000 that previewed the final partisan split.⁷ The first seven days alone exceeded totals from prior midterm and presidential primary years.¹

What Pulled Voters to the Polls

The open U.S. Senate seat was the main driver on both ballots. On the Democratic side, State Representative James Talarico defeated U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett outright, taking 53% of the vote with 83% of ballots counted on election night.⁸

The Republican side went unresolved on election night. Incumbent Senator John Cornyn led Attorney General Ken Paxton 42% to 41%, with Representative Wesley Hunt at 13%, and no candidate cleared the majority needed to avoid a runoff. Combined advertising spending in the GOP race approached $100 million.⁸

The quieter 2022 cycle, by contrast, leaned mostly on the gubernatorial contest and had far fewer competitive down-ballot fights, which helps explain the lower turnout that year.¹

Where the Votes Came From

Rural counties posted the highest turnout rate at 26%, followed by the suburbs of major metros at 25%, major metropolitan counties at 24%, and medium-sized metro areas at 20%. But the biggest growth came from urban and suburban Texas. Major metro counties saw participation jump roughly 66% over 2022, and the suburbs of large metros grew by 54%. Rural counties grew by only 12%.⁹

Harris County led in raw numbers with 355,201 Democratic and 198,022 Republican ballots. Dallas County followed with 273,330 Democratic and 101,798 Republican votes. Travis County produced 196,199 Democratic ballots, reflecting Austin’s left-leaning electorate. On the Republican side, Tarrant and Collin counties were the strongest performers outside Harris, with 145,771 and 102,314 votes respectively.⁵

Turnout Dropped Sharply in the May Runoff

The Republican Senate primary advanced to a May 26 runoff between Cornyn and Paxton, and participation fell steeply. More than 1.3 million Republicans voted in the runoff, a 36% decline from the roughly 2.2 million who voted in March.¹⁰ Democratic runoff turnout was lower still, about 470,000 ballots, largely because the Senate nomination had already been decided in March.¹¹

The median turnout decline across all 2026 runoff races was 42%, and some down-ballot contests saw far steeper drops: an 82% decline in the Democratic primary for Texas’ 17th Congressional District and a 71% decline in the 33rd District race.¹⁰ Research cited by FairVote found a direct correlation between the length of the delay separating a primary from its runoff and the severity of the drop-off; the 2026 cycle had a 12-week gap between the two elections.

Paxton won the runoff by roughly 28 points, about 64% to 36%. His vote total held roughly steady from March, while Cornyn’s dropped by more than 400,000 votes, a 45% decline.¹²

How 2026 Fits the Longer Pattern

Even at 24%, the 2026 primary left more than three-quarters of registered Texans on the sidelines. Primary turnout in Texas has historically run low. Data from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas shows presidential-year primaries averaging about 18% of the voting-age population and gubernatorial-year primaries averaging about 15%.¹³

Several structural factors shape those numbers. Texas runs an open primary, so voters pick a party’s ballot on Election Day rather than registering with a party in advance. Competitive races are widely cited as the single strongest turnout driver, which fits the gap between the packed 2026 slate and the quieter 2022 cycle. Texas also has the third-lowest median age in the country, and younger residents vote at lower rates. A large immigrant population of 4.7 million people, many of whom are not yet citizens, further reduces the share of residents eligible to vote.¹⁴

Whether the Democratic surge reflects a durable shift or a one-cycle reaction to an unusually competitive slate is still an open question heading into November, when Paxton and Talarico face off in what would be Democrats’ first statewide win in Texas since 1994.¹⁵

1
Texas Tribune. Texas 2026 Primary Turnout Democratic Republican
2
Houston Public Media. Texas Sees Record Voter Turnout in Primaries Led by Democratic Voters
3
Texas Secretary of State. March 2026 Primary Election News Release
4
Iowa Public Radio. Democrats Set a Turnout Record in Texas
5
KXAN. March 2026 Turnout Tracker
6
Houston Chronicle. Texas Sets New Record Early Voting Primaries
7
The Hill. Texas Senate GOP Runoff Early Voting
8
NBC News. Texas Senate Primary Results
9
Daily Yonder. Rural Voters Lead Turnout in 2026 Texas Primaries
10
FairVote. Texas Senate Runoff Sees Turnout Decline by 36
11
KERA News. Texas May Runoff Election Results Paxton Cornyn
12
Brookings Institution. Paxtons Landslide Win Signals End of Bush-Era Texas GOP
13
University of Texas Texas Politics Project. Voter Turnout
14
Texas Tribune. Texas Voter Turnout Electorate Explainer
15
19th News. Texas US Senate Primary Election Results 2026