Republicans in Texas are already closing the gap created by the Democrats’ early lead. As of Monday evening, voters with a Republican voting history had narrowly cast more ballots in person than the Democrats — 30.5% of early votes to their 29.7%, according to analysis by Republican consultant Derek Ryan, who runs Texas political research firm Ryan Data.
Ryan said he expects that gap to continue to widen in favor of Republicans, because fewer of them have voted so far and many plan to do so in the coming days, as well as on Election Day itself. However, he ultimately said the large numbers of votes cast by people with no established voting history for either party make the outcome impossible to predict.
“The big increase that you see is among Democratic voters, which is not surprising based on what we see in polling, which is that a lot of Democratic voters said they plan to vote early and in person this time,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin. “But Republicans have also already surpassed their 2016 share of the early votes.”
“There’s a lot of early voting going on,” said Henson.
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