The Democratic base vote can be predicted from the O’Rourke 2018 return.
High Early voting largely coincides with high Democratic counties, with the notable exception of the lower Rio Grande.
Texas has wildly differing population density, and a third map show total voting totals per county, based on the 2016 presidential vote. The O’Rourke campaign had about 92% turnout compared with the 2016 presidential election, but a generally higher margin of Democratic votes.
Victory in Texas is dependent on achieving a substantial net margin in widely scattered and diverse concentrations.
I am quite certain, the Biden campaign knows of the relative under performance of the lower Rio Grande in the Early Voting turnout.
Is voter suppression in the lower Rio Grande proving more successful ? Alternatively and more optimistically, voting in person on election day may have deep cultural roots in this region.
Shapefile used to create map (consists of a simple union of a county outline map and County early voting files ). shared publicly at this link: drive.google.com/…
To make the map more navigable, I used a separate shape file of Texas cities (and then filtered the display to only include cities greater than 150K population). prod-hub-indexer.s3.amazonaws.com/...
Use QGIS or similar software to open the shapefiles (which has an attribute table of voting values).
Texas Secretary of State has county data updated daily at:
earlyvoting.texas-election.com/...