Surge in voter turnout in urban, border counties carried Texas blue wave

A surge in voter turnout along the Texas-Mexico border and in the state’s most populous counties carried Democrats to an astonishing sweep in Tuesday’s election and broke a decadeslong exile from statewide office in Texas, preliminary data show.

Some 9.8 million Texans cast their ballots in this year’s unusually contested midterms, the most voters in a Texas midterm since at least 1970, though turnout failed to set a record.

A record 19 million Texans were registered to vote in Tuesday’s election, roughly 418,000 more than in 2024. A little more than half of them — 51.6% — cast ballots in the general election, according to preliminary data from the Texas Secretary of State’s office. That’s higher turnout than in the last midterm election in 2022, but fell short of the 2018 midterm, when 53% of registered voters cast a ballot.

Last night’s turnout sat well below voter turnout two years ago, 61.2%.

That means last night’s historic win for Democrats came from a national wave, not record turnout, said Joshua Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project.

“It’s not as though this was a wildly high turnout election,” Blank said. “It’s just that the nature of the turnout obviously favored Democrats overwhelmingly.”

Compared to 2022, the last midterm election, voter turnout and Democratic margins were higher in this election across every geography: urban, suburban, exurban, rural and border counties. Border counties and the state’s large urban counties had the largest surge, and rural counties had the smallest growth in turnout.

Those surges coincided with Democratic gains, with the biggest growth in Democratic margins occurring in border counties and exurbs, places on the very edge of the state’s urban areas.

“Democrats were able to have massive wins in urban/suburban counties while also making enough gains in rural counties to hurt Republicans’ chances even more,” wrote Derek Ryan, a Republican consultant and data analyst, in a newsletter Wednesday.

The biggest swings to Democrats came from majority-Hispanic counties in South Texas and along the border that went heavily for President Donald Trump in 2024, with Starr, Zapata, Maverick, Hidalgo and Webb counties each shifting upwards of 38 points toward Democrats.

Turnout surged by more than 8 percentage points in the state’s 16 border counties compared with the 2022 elections.

Suburban counties like Collin, Denton and Fort Bend, places that have seen tremendous population growth since the start of the decade, saw turnout grow by some 4.7 points over the 2022 elections. These counties swung the hardest to the left compared to the 2018 U.S. Senate election, by 19 points.

Sen. Ted Cruz led in the suburbs by about 19 points in 2018. James Talarico, the Democratic Senate victor this year, narrowly won these counties by less than half a point.

Turnout in the state’s rural areas — the most reliably Republican parts of the state — ticked up 1.4 points. Republicans have historically relied on rural votes to run up the score statewide.

Republicans’ margin in rural counties shrank Tuesday. Cruz won rural counties by 54.4 points in 2018. Paxton won them by about 45.

The number of ballots cast grew in 169 counties that had fully reported, but fell in 79. The overwhelming majority of registered voters live in counties where turnout rose.

Turnout grew the most in counties that went for President Donald Trump by less than 20 points in 2024 and in those that former Vice President Kamala Harris won that year.

But turnout was also up in counties that Trump won by 20 to 70 points.