More votes does not always mean a higher turnout rate.
Select Texas or the United States, then switch between total ballots and participation rates. Click any year’s bar for its context and primary source.
Texas · ballots cast
At a glance
What actually broke records?
Texas cast more midterm ballots in 2026 than in 2018 or 2022. But 2018 still had a slightly higher percentage of registered Texans participating.
Nationally, 2026’s estimated ballot count exceeds the 2018 and 2022 midterms. The voting-eligible-population participation rate, however, remains below 2018’s.
Population, registration… or people actually showing up?
Texas added voters to the rolls between midterms, but the rise in participation accounts for much of the change in ballots. This is an arithmetic breakdown—not a record of who voted for which party.
2022 → 2026 Texas midterms
Try a different 2026 turnout rate
With the 2026 registration count held fixed, how many ballots would different participation rates produce?
This scenario cannot tell how many were newly eligible, returned after sitting out 2022, or switched parties. Births, noncitizen migrants and children do not automatically become eligible voters.
Democrats gained votes. Republicans did not simply disappear.
Comparable statewide races show striking vote changes. Select an office below; the years are both midterms, so the comparison is more meaningful than treating 2024’s presidential turnout as a midterm baseline.
Candidate votes are not party registration or voter histories. Changes may reflect turnout, persuasion, different nominees, third-party votes and ballot roll-off.
One election, different voter behavior
In the 2022 governor race, Greg Abbott received 4,437,099 votes and Beto O’Rourke 3,553,656.
In the 2026 governor race, unofficial totals showed Abbott with 4,524,527 and Gina Hinojosa with 5,230,789.
That is roughly 1.68 million additional votes for the Democratic candidate, while the Republican candidate’s total was roughly 87,000 higher than in 2022. It is therefore inaccurate to explain the statewide result solely as Republicans staying home.
One surprising Senate comparison
James Talarico’s 2026 total exceeded Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate vote by roughly 1.4 million votes, even though both were midterms.
Source: 2026 Texas returns ↗ · 2022 official governor canvass ↗.
How many Republicans voted Democratic?
Survey respondents can report both their party identity or their previous presidential vote and their 2026 choice. That allows estimates of crossover voting—but not identification of individual ballots.
Make the estimate yourself
Illustrative formula: 2026 ballots × estimated share of voters in this group × estimated percentage supporting Talarico. Multiple groups overlap: never add their totals together.
What the survey suggests
In the reported CNN voter-poll figures, around 11% of Republicans and 11% of participating 2024 Trump voters supported Talarico in 2026. Some independents and people who said they had not voted in 2024 also supported him.
The 2024 Trump-voter figure is not the number of people who voted Trump in all three elections. Party identification and 2024 vote are overlapping categories; voter-poll numbers are rounded, sampled and self-reported.
Sources: Post-election reporting on Trump-voter switching ↗ · CNN Texas Senate exit-poll page ↗.
Where did participation rise the most?
County-level changes are powerful evidence of a changing electorate, but they do not establish whether particular residents switched their votes. Compare regional turnout-rate changes from 2022.
Change in turnout rate, 2022 → 2026
Which areas moved?
Border counties: The 16-county border region saw turnout rise more than 8 percentage points. Several counties that supported Trump in 2024 swung sharply back toward Democrats in the 2026 Senate election.
Suburbs: Collin, Denton and Fort Bend were among the places with turnout growth around 4.7 points. Talarico narrowly carried the Tribune’s suburban grouping after Ted Cruz had won it by about 19 points in 2018.
Rural Texas: Turnout increased roughly 1.4 points, while the Republican Senate margin in rural counties declined from approximately 54.4 points in 2018 to 45 points in 2026.
Some counties recorded declining turnout and some growth. A shift in county margins is not proof that any particular voter changed candidates.
Open Texas Tribune’s geographic analysis ↗Which major counties swung furthest toward Democrats?
Compare each county’s 2024 Trump–Harris presidential margin with its 2026 Talarico–Paxton U.S. Senate margin. Changes are expressed in percentage points, not percentages of voters who personally switched. The races are for different offices and involve different electorates.
| County | 2024 President | 2026 Senate | D shift |
|---|
The 17 counties form an illustrative subset of large counties, not a complete dataset of all 254 Texas counties. Margins are rounded to one decimal, which can create 0.1-point rounding differences in swings. Source values and comparisons as published November 6, 2026; 2026 figures remain unofficial.
“I voted for Trump three times. In 2026, I voted for a Democrat.”
Yes, that exact pattern can occur.
The author personally knows more than one person who says they voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, then supported a Democrat in the 2026 midterms.
These firsthand accounts are worth recording, because they describe a more specific form of crossover than simply “voted for Trump in 2024.” They are self-reported anecdotes, not independent ballot verification or a representative sample.
The frequency remains unknown.
Voter surveys showing approximately one-tenth of 2024 Trump voters supporting some 2026 Democratic Senate candidates give statistical context for switching, including in Texas. They do not isolate everyone who supported Trump in all three presidential elections.
There is no reliable population-wide percentage for that precise 3× Trump-to-Democrat sequence in the evidence reviewed here. The anecdotes establish reported examples—not an estimate of how many such Texans exist.
Three things can all be true at once
Republican-leaning voters may sit out; some voters may cross party lines; and Democratic-leaning or previously absent voters may turn out. Official totals alone cannot partition the electorate into these individual histories. The best assessment combines returns, registration data and well-designed voter surveys—without treating them as interchangeable.
Every key claim has a clickable source.
These links lead to government records, methodological data tables and published survey reporting. The article is a dated snapshot, not an automatic live-data feed.
Methods & limitations
Texas turnout denominator: total ballots divided by the Texas Secretary of State’s registered-voter count. The 2026 rate is calculated from a Nov. 6 unofficial governor-race vote count and an October 16 registration announcement. Some ballots omit a vote for governor, so the calculated value is a conservative proxy—not the eventual certified ballots-cast turnout statistic.
National turnout denominator: voting-eligible population (VEP) per University of Florida Election Lab, not total population or registered voters. Its preliminary estimate for the total Texas 2026 ballot count is 10.365 million (48.82% of eligible voters), which differs from the narrower official governor-race vote total of 9.907 million displayed in Texas calculations here. These use different measurements and should not be spliced into one series without checking methodology and timestamps.
Voting-preference data: candidate vote totals, self-reported party affiliation, recalled 2024 presidential votes and county-level swings measure different things. Survey-based person-count extrapolations assume the sample percentages apply to the election-wide ballot count and are displayed rounded.
Changes over time: late ballots, recounts, corrections, and certified canvasses may alter the preliminary 2026 figures. No demographic or geographic comparison proves why an individual voted a particular way.