Democrats are outpacing Republicans at an accelerating rate one week into early voting for the Texas primary election on March 3. This comes after the Lone Star State won a redistricting war that favored Republicans and went all the way to the US Supreme Court. As of Feb. 24, the Texas Secretary of State reported the cumulative tally of Republican in-person and mail-in ballots during the first week of early voting was 593,692, and Democrats’ total was 665,701.
Conservative political activist Scott Presler, who has been lobbying lawmakers in Washington, DC, to pass the SAVE America Act, responded on X to the numbers: “Visited Senator Thune’s DC office — again — to deliver a message: Democrats are outvoting Republicans in Texas right now by more 100,000 votes. If you pass the SAVE America Act, voter turnout will skyrocket. It’s time.” Earlier Presler had posted: “If Texas falls, the nation falls.”
High-profile candidates and the Supreme Court battle have made Texas races even more prominent on the national stage as one of the states to watch going into the 2026 midterms.
Political analysts have told local media that the race is energizing turnout. And the buzz around Talarico’s late-night talk show interview with Stephen Colbert last week appears to have helped.
CBS pulled the segment, reportedly over the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule, but a conversation between Colbert and the Senate hopeful posted on YouTube has garnered more than 5 million views. In it, Colbert said the Trump administration wants to “silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV.” Colbert, after being advised by CBS not to mention Talarico on his show, did so, directing his audience to find the interview online.
“I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico responded. That’s enough to bring Democrat voters out.
For her part, Crockett said in a press conference reported by The Hill that she had appeared on Colbert’s show “a number of times,” and she didn’t believe it was the FCC’s doing to shut down the interview:
“Let me be clear, I don’t have any love for the current FCC. I don’t want anybody to believe that I do. I do not have any love for them. I do think that there are additional layers at play here. And so, before we put out our formal statement, I do want to make sure that Paramount, who is the parent company, puts out theirs, and we have exactly what happened versus kind of the mania that just so happened to play out on the very first day of early voting.”
A much calmer race by comparison but no less consequential is the Republican primary, which is reportedly expected to go to a runoff. Sen. John Cornyn faces two challengers in the primary – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt – with no endorsements yet from President Donald Trump.
A Feb. 9 University of Houston poll has Paxton in the lead by 38%, followed by Cornyn at 31% and Hunt at 17%, with 14% undecided.
The same poll has Crockett leading Talarico, despite the Colbert commotion, 47% to 39%.
In the end, early voting turnout may not be indicative of the general election outcome, as the same University of Houston poll has a match-up between all of the Republican candidates for Senate beating the Democrats, albeit by 1 to 4 percentage points.
In the gubernatorial race, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott faces ten challengers in the primary and the winner of the field of nine Democrats. Endorsed by Trump, Abbott is forecast as “safe for the incumbent,” according to 270toWin. The last day of early voting in Texas is Feb. 27.
