Tarrant County's 2026 Primary: The Early Vote Is In
Early Voting Complete — 4 Days Until March 3rd
Early voting in Tarrant County’s 2026 primary is done. Eleven days. The ballots are cast, the data is in, and the picture is clear. This is the full accounting of the Early Vote (with Election Day still to come).
The Numbers, Final
When early voting opened, Democrats were showing up in numbers that looked almost too good to be true. Over eleven days, I kept expecting the trend would break. It didn’t. Every day of Early Voting Democrats outpaced Republicans.
Democrats cast 122,184 early ballots in the Tarrant County primary. Republicans cast 91,684. The final D/R ratio landed at 1.33.
Let’s sit with that for a minute. In 2024, that ratio was 0.42. In 2022, it was 0.51. In 2018, a strong Democratic year nationally and when Beto almost Ted Cruz statewide and did nudge him out in Tarrant County, it was 0.69. The highest it had reached in recent years in Tarrant County was 0.90 in 2020, a presidential primary year with enormous Democratic energy. This cycle, in a midterm primary, Democrats more than doubled their 2024 ratio and blew past every previous benchmark.
It is also worth being transparent about something: the ratio did settle slightly from its peak mid-period. Around day seven, it sat at 1.41. The final few days saw Republicans close the ratio gap somewhat. That narrowing is real, and it is worth noting. Keeping up a ratio that historically high across eleven full days of voting is genuinely hard. That it held at 1.33 is not a disappointment. It is historic.
Who Showed Up: A Portrait
Raw turnout numbers tell you something. The composition of who is casting those ballots tells you everything.
Age
The Republican primary electorate is old. Not older. Old. At the close of early voting, 53.8% of GOP primary early voters were 65 or older. That is more than half. The 18-to-29 bracket? 2.5%.
The Democratic picture looks like a different party entirely. Voters 65 and older make up just 29.1% of the Democratic early vote, and that number fell steadily across the eleven days as younger voters came in stronger in the later period. Meanwhile, 37.9% of Democratic early voters are 45-to-64, 21.9% are 30-to-44, and 11.1% are 18-to-29. That is a primary electorate with actual generational range. One party is showing up with its most reliable, if aging, base. The other is building something broader.
Gender
This one deserves its own section. In the Republican primary, the gender split is essentially even: 50.4% male, 49.1% female. Balanced, unremarkable.
In the Democratic primary, women cast 61.4% of early ballots. Men were at 37.4%.
That is not a small gap. That is a 24-point gender split. Democratic primary turnout in Tarrant County this cycle is, in a meaningful and measurable way, being powered by women. In a political environment where reproductive rights, healthcare, and education have dominated the conversation, that number is not surprising. But seeing it this clearly in the data is striking.
Race and Gender in Tandem
This is where the two parties look most different, and it is worth going there directly.
The Republican primary early electorate is 39.1% White Male and 35.8% White Female. That is 74.9% of all Republican primary early voters coming from a single racial group. Every other demographic, Black, Latino, Asian, Other, fills in the remaining quarter in small single-digit increments.
The Democratic primary tells a multiracial story. White Female leads at 22.3%, followed closely by Black Female at 21.8%. White Male is third at 16.3%. Latina Female comes in at 10.7%, Black Male at 10.4%. The Democratic early electorate in Tarrant County genuinely reflects the county’s diversity in a way the Republican one does not.
The cross-party breakdown by demographic group makes this even starker. Among Black voters who cast early primary ballots, 87% voted Democratic and 13% Republican. Among Latino voters, Democrats led 79-to-21 among Latina women and 71-to-29 among Latino men. Among Asian voters, Democrats led across the board. The only group where Republicans held the majority: White voters. And even there, White women split 55% Republican to 45% Democratic, a gap that has been narrowing.
It’s Not Crossover. It’s Expansion.
Every time Democratic primary numbers surge, someone offers the crossover explanation. Either Republicans voting Democratic because they like a candidate, or Republicans voting Democratic to meddle in the other party’s primary. The data, now complete, continues to reject that story.
In the Republican primary, 79.8% of early voters have a history of voting only in Republican primaries. In the Democratic primary, 57.2% are consistent Democratic primary voters. Voters with a history of voting only in the other party’s primaries are a rounding error on both sides. Just 2.9% of Democratic early voters have an R-primaries-only history. That is it.
What is growing on the Democratic side, and grew across all eleven days, is the “General Only” and “No Voting History” buckets. General-only voters now make up 29.9% of the Democratic early vote. Voters with no prior voting history at all: 4.2%. Together, that is more than one in three Democratic primary early voters who are either brand new to primaries or brand new to voting altogether.
That is not crossover. That is expansion. And it is arguably more meaningful than the turnout number itself, because it suggests a coalition that is actively growing rather than simply reshuffling.
The Crossover Story Is More Complicated Than You Think
Based on voting history alone, crossover is minimal on both sides. But voter scores tell a more interesting story, and it’s mostly on the Republican side.
In the Republican primary, about 1.3% of early voters score as deep blue Democrats. That’s not nothing. At 46,000+ votes, that’s real people. But it goes further: another roughly 14% score as Democratic or at least Democratic-leaning. So somewhere between one in seven and one in six Republican primary voters look, by the data, like they may not be Republicans. Hmmm. Wonder what could be happening there? Read on.
The Democratic primary? Much cleaner. There are some lower-scoring voters whose scores might suggest Republican leanings, but that picture has a plausible and important explanation. Tarrant County has a long history of strategic primary voting going back 30 years (see above in the Republican Primary). Many of those voters are likely longtime Democrats who spent years voting in Republican primaries because that’s where Tarrant County elections were actually decided. They’re coming home. Some of those folks may be Republicans who’ve decided their party no longer represents them. A small number might even be doing their own version of strategic voting in reverse. But the percentage is small, and it pales in comparison to what we see on the Republican side.
Bottom line: if there’s a crossover story in this data, it’s not Democrats flooding the Republican primary. It’s Democrats showing up in their own primary. This feels like a historic Democratic surge, and it’s coming from Democrats, or at least folks who align with our values.
This Is Bigger Than Tarrant
Tarrant County is a useful lens, but it is not the whole picture. Statewide data from the Texas Secretary of State, which it should be noted has been inconsistent in its update frequency and should be read as directionally informative rather than precise, shows the same pattern playing out across Texas’s largest counties after nine days of early voting.
The statewide D/R ratio through nine days sits at 1.12, compared to 0.55 for the full 2022 primary and 0.67 for all of 2018. Dallas County is at 2.89. Harris at 1.60. Bexar at 2.23. Travis at 3.91. Even Collin County, as reliably Republican a suburb as exists in the state, is sitting at 0.97, effectively even between the two parties. Denton is at 0.71, nearly double its 2022 number. Fort Bend at 1.23. Montgomery County remains deep red at 0.32, but even that is more than double its 2022 figure of 0.15.
This is not just a Tarrant phenomenon. It is a Texas phenomenon. But Tarrant is the frontline.
What It Means, And What It Doesn’t
These are early voting numbers in a primary. That caveat matters, and I can’t just wave it away.
Primary enthusiasm does not automatically carry to a general election, but I do have a LOT of thoughts there that I’ll dig into soon. Here is what we know: We’ve seen motivated people seek out an early voting location during a busy workweek, or fit in voting during our one weekend of Early voting. Election Day could bring a different mix. November will bring a different mix still, with higher overall turnout, different candidate matchups, and a national environment that may look nothing like today’s.
BUT, you can’t dismiss the composition of what is being built. A Democratic primary electorate that is younger, more female, more racially diverse, and fueled in large part by voters who are new to primaries entirely: that is not a one-cycle flash. That is a coalition being constructed in real time. Whether it holds, whether it shows up in November, whether it translates from primary enthusiasm to general election results: those are the questions. And those answers come later.
For now, the early vote is done. The data is clear. Democrats turned out in historic numbers in Tarrant County, and the trend held across eleven days and across the state. That is what happened. What it means for March 3rd and beyond, we are gonna know soon enough.
March 3rd is four days away. I’ll be back with the full picture once the votes are counted. See ya then!
See It. Name It. Fight It.
Thank you! This is really great and relevant information. The mutligenerational voting from the Dems is exciting to see.
Love it. This underscores the motivation of the Republican party in going after education, from kindergarten to college. They know that educated people are less easily manipulated by propaganda and rhetoric. We need to be watching the minds of our children, which they thirst for. And colleges like the UT, A&M, and UNT systems, who have deligitimized themselves with their concessions to authoritarian attack on free thought, need to feel it on their ability to maintain enrollment.