A record 7.4 million Texans voted early in the midterms, giving Democrats an apparent lead in turnout. A record 7.4 million Texans voted early in the midterms, giving Democrats an apparent lead in turnout and forcing Republicans to rely more heavily on independents to win key races, analysts say.

Texas voters don’t with a party. Analysts extrapolate party affiliation from records showing which primary they voted in, with those who skip the primary considered independent.

More Democrats voted early than Republicans in urban counties. More Republicans voted in the state’s suburban and rural areas. But the number of independents outpaced both parties.

“Democrats lead in Texas’s big counties. Republicans lead everywhere else. Independents decide it,” nonpartisan Houston area-based early voting expert Steven David said in his analysis.

David said 54 percent of independents need to vote Republican for the GOP to break even with Democrats, and that’s unlikely. Usually they’re evenly split between the parties, he said.

A number of factors, he said, make it difficult to predict voter behavior: enthusiastic first-time and sporadic left-leaning voters and disaffected right-leaning voters staying home, splitting their ticket or skipping certain races.

Most independent early voters didn’t vote in 2024, nearly half are Latino, and many are young and female, Tom Bonnier, a polling analyst at Target Smart, noted on That doesn’t guarantee Democrats victory in the crucial U.S. Senate race, he said. “Dems start in a big hole in [Texas]. To me this shows the race is in play.”