Texas Democrats are bringing new voters; Republicans are bringing regulars

Among Texans who had voted early in the 2026 general by Oct 23, 8% of Democrats had voted in neither the 2022 nor the 2024 general election, against 4% of Republicans. Another 16% of Democrats had voted in 2024 but not 2022, against 11% of Republicans. 84% of Republican early voters had voted in both elections, against 74% of Democrats. The figures come from the NBC News / TargetSmart Texas page, where party is modelled.

What it means

The Democratic early vote in Texas is drawing more heavily on people who do not usually vote in midterms. About one Democratic early voter in four (24%) either skipped 2022 or skipped both elections. For Republicans it is about one in seven (15%).

The Republican early vote is mostly habitual voters. Five in six voted in both of the last two general elections. That pattern fits a party whose base votes in every cycle.

For both parties, the mix still leans heavily on regulars. Across all Texas early voters, 77% voted in both 2022 and 2024, 15% in 2024 only, 1% in 2022 only and 7% in neither. Nationally the share who voted in both is 80%.

The group TargetSmart does not assign to either party is the least habitual: 54% voted in both, 28% in 2024 only and 16% in neither.

What it doesn’t mean

The party labels are a model. Texas has no party registration, and NBC marks its Texas party column as modelled by TargetSmart. New voters are the hardest group to model, because they have little history to model from. A modelled “new Democrat” is a guess about someone with few records.

The state’s own records cannot check this. When we sorted Texas early voters by 2026 primary history, a third had no primary ballot at all. In Tarrant County, which posts past general-election rosters, 94% of the 180,830 people who voted in 2024 without having voted in the county’s 2020 or 2022 general had no primary history either. Primary records describe habitual voters well and new voters hardly at all.

“New” here means no vote in the 2022 or 2024 general. Some of these voters will have voted before 2022, or in another state.

It does not mean new voters decide the result. 8% of Democratic early voters is a small group, and the early vote is not the whole electorate.

How we checked

We read the vote-history breakdown from the NBC News / TargetSmart Texas page in two snapshots on Oct 23, 2026, at 03:30 and 17:30 GMT. Both gave the same shares. The later snapshot covered 1,039,431 Democratic, 1,046,185 Republican and 208,668 Other early voters, out of 2,294,284. NBC publishes shares as whole percentages, so each is precise to about half a point.

The national 80% is our weighted sum, from the 17:30 GMT snapshot, of the same breakdown across states on NBC’s pages.

For the Tarrant County comparison we used the county’s posted general-election and primary rosters for 2020 to 2024, kept only voter IDs and counted voters. “New” there means no vote in the county’s 2020 or 2022 general rosters, because earlier rosters are not posted.