Texas: Yes You Can!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10/22/2024:

[T]he first polls in the state opened early Monday.

About 100,000 turned out to vote in Harris County, home of Houston — half again as many as turned out in the general election of 2016, the last year for which there are statistics from the Texas Secretary of State.

Travis County, the home of Austin, broke records with 46,600 people showing up on the first day, which the county clerk said topped first-day voting in the last three elections.

Nearly 47,000 people voted in Bexar, the home of San Antonio, where some voters waited for over two hours in line to vote.

Turnout was also up well over 2016 levels in purpling suburban counties like the Houston suburbs of Fort Bend and the Dallas suburb of Collin County.

These rising numbers can be explained in part by the fact that there are a lot more Texans than there used to be — a function of both the state’s high birthrate and migration from other states. Between 2016 and 2024, Texas’s population grew by 15 percent.

But it may also in part be a result of the steady increase in the number of registered voters in the state, which has risen faster than the population as a whole.

[...]

Over that same period, the share of registered voters in Texas has increased by 22 percent — seven points more than the overall rise in population.

[...]

[A] purpling trend has been most pronounced in the state’s big urban counties, but is also present in its still conservative, but increasingly competitive suburbs.

[...]

And the Democratic vote share in the cities rose by two-thirds in the same period, from 562,000 in 2016 to 925,000 in 2020 — an increase that more than doubled the share of votes Democrats lost over that period in the state’s ever-redder rural counties, where populations are decreasing.

[...]

While the overall trend may favor Democrats, surveys of likely voters show both Trump and Cruz solidly in the lead in Texas. A poll of 1091 likely voters released last week by the TPP found that Cruz was up 7 points over Allred, while Trump led Harris by 5 points.

But those numbers come with a caveat, Blank told The Hill — they are drawn from likely voters, who in Texas tend to be older and whiter than the state as a whole.

[...]

In a reflection of the tight race, Vice President Harris announced on Tuesday that she would rally in Harris County on Friday with Allred — an unexpected stop in a whirlwind campaign tour largely focused on more traditional swing states.

  The Hill