DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
During the first week of early voting in Texas, Democrats cast far more votes than Republicans across the state. Even though both parties showed gains in numbers of voters, the increase in voters on the Democratic side was especially significant.
Early voting ends Friday, Feb. 27. Primary Election Day is next Tuesday, March 3. Find your Election Day polling place online at VoteTexas.gov.
In Dallas and Tarrant counties, Democrats followed statewide trends with large increases in votes compared to 2024. Republicans in both counties voted in slightly larger numbers than in 2024, but were easily out-paced by the Democrats.
For the first seven days of early voting in Dallas County, 93,143 Democrats cast their ballots, compared to 29,801 Republicans.
Only two of the 78 early voting locations in the county were busier than the Oak Lawn Library — Fretz Park Library on Belt Line Road at Hillcrest had about 200 more voters than Oak Lawn in the first week, and Disciple Central Community Church on Polk Street in DeSoto had 1,000 more voters than the voting location in the heart of the Gayborhood. Only 235 of the 5,823 votes cast at the Disciple Central location during the first week of early voting were Republican in the south Dallas County suburb.
In Harris County during the first five days of voting, 76,555 people voted as Democrats compared to 46,755 Republicans. Bexar County saw 49,011 Democrats vote and just 22,675 Republicans.
Travis County saw about the same number of Democrats vote as in the last election — 47,830 — but 10,000 fewer Republicans than last time — 12,547. And El Paso had almost three times the number of Democrats cast ballots — 14,707 vs. 5,263.
Those numbers may not be surprising coming from Texas’ largest Democratic strongholds.
But the numbers in Tarrant County, the largest Republican county in the U.S., may be more unexpected — or maybe not, just weeks after Taylor Rehmet’s stunning special election victory.
In that race, Rehmet, a Democrat, defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss by more than 13 points in a district that voted for Trump by more than 20 points just two years ago and has been held by Republicans since at least 1992.
During the first week of early voting, 55,696 people cast ballots in the Democratic Primary across the county, while only 39,080 Republicans voted. In 2024, more than double the number of Republicans compared to Democrats voted in the first week of early voting in Tarrant County.
Only Collin County, among large, urban counties, saw more Republicans vote the first five days — 24,995 vs. Democrats 24,141.
And Democrats are not just flipping seats around the country, they’re holding onto seats with wider than expected margins.
In a special election for a seat in the Louisiana House, held in early February, Chasity Verret Martinez held onto a state House seat in a district Donald Trump won three times. The open seat was expected to flip Republican.
But Martinez beat her opponent with 62 percent of the vote even though she was outspent by the Republican 3-to-1. She focused her campaign on affordability issues — a topic Trump has been deriding recently.
Since Trump came back into office, Republicans have not picked up any seats from Democrats in special elections, while Democrats have flipped 28 seats in state houses and in Congress, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
For this fall’s general election, the organization Swing Left has identified 19 flippable Republican seats, although none of them are in Texas. The seats are currently held by Republican representatives but are in districts Trump won by 6.5 percent or less.
To counter redistricting in Texas that was designed to allow Republicans to pick up five seats in Congress, Virginia passed a new map that could result in Democrats picking up four seats, and California’s new map may allow five more Democrats to be elected.
The DLCC believes that if momentum holds, Democrats can pick up more than 650 legislative seats in statehouses across the county in November. They identify Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as battleground states.
But Texas is not far behind, lumped into the second tier of target states listed as a Powerbuild state despite redistricting.
Louise Young has been active in Democratic politics in Texas for decades. She’s seen what she considers good election cycles and bad.
This one, she said, is looking good.
“I think it’s going to be better than good,” Young told Dallas Voice this week. “I think it’s going to be remarkable. Years from now it’ll be spoken about as a turning point in our country based on what happened in Texas.
“Our country is not willing to dissolve into a dictatorship,” she said, adding that voters all over the country care about the U.S. Constitution, even if Trump does not.
And, Young said, Trump does not care about the Constitution, she said.
To Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, it’s clear Democrats will do well this year, maybe the best they’ve done in three decades. That’s because a Democrat will be running in every state and federal race that will be on the ballot in Texas.
“When we compete in every corner of the state, we will have better results,” he said, also noting that Texans are in a “throw the bums out” mood this election cycle.
The State of the Union address
A number of Democrats protested the president’s policies by not appearing for the State of the Union address held at the Capitol on Tuesday evening. Those in the Texas delegation were in the middle of the primary.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett sent a message to supporters that she was boycotting the State of the Union, but she simply wasn’t in Washington. She was in Texas campaigning. “I will spend tonight continuing the fight to actually strengthen the State of the Union,” she wrote.
In a separate message to media, Crockett listed her Wednesday campaign appearances in Harris County.
Rep. Julie Johnson, who is in a tight race with Colin Allred for the Democratic nomination for the 33rd District, also remained in Texas to campaign.
Much of the LGBTQ+ community listened to Trump’s speech wondering how he was going to attack the community. The answer came early in his speech as he listed elimination of DEI as an accomplishment during his first year back in office. The mention of ending inclusion and equality drew a round of applause from the Republican side of the House chamber.
The only new attack on LGBTQ+ people was against trans youth as he called for schools to stop allowing students to socially transition. Although lots of students go by a name other than the first name on their birth certificate, a ban on socially transitioning means trans youth would have to use the name on their birth certificate.
Using preferred pronouns or presenting as the preferred gender would also be banned without parental consent. And parental consent involves forced outing in many instances, often putting the child in a dangerous position.
Human Rights Campaign issued a statement condemning Trump’s remarks:
“Families and their doctors do not need Donald Trump telling them what care they do or do not need,” HRC National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf wrote. “Unfortunately, this is just the latest attempt from Trump and his fellow MAGA politicians to wrestle away medical freedom from American families and distract from their complete failure to solve this country’s pressing issues.”
Wolfe said that while health costs soar, inflation continues due to Trump’s tariffs, masked federal agents are still terrorizing our streets, trans kids are blamed for the country’s ills.
“No amount of transphobic fear mongering will change the reality of the state of our union,” he wrote.