It’s such a slow news week (/s) that I bet we all need some voter registration math to pass the time. Lol. But this news feed item caught my eye — Texas officials reported a record-breaking voter registration figure of 15.6 millions last week, with just about two weeks remaining until the registration cutoff on Tuesday, Oct 9. So I wanted to do some research and see what this might mean, and here’s my takeaway: this is looking like a presidential year electorate, not a midterm electorate.
But let’s do the math.
Historical Registration Stats
Probably the best registration metric to use if we want to try to gauge enthusiasm (given the limited data the Texas SoS provides), we probably want to first look at the percent of voting age residents who registered to vote. As with most state, this figure ebbs and flows as elections approach. Presidential years tend to encourage more eligible residents to register than midterm years. But let’s look at past elections:
Percent of VAP (voting age population) registered
2004: 81.5%
2006: 78.5%
2008: 76.5%
2010: 71.0%
2012: 74.6%
2014: 74.2%
2016: 78.2%
Now: 78.4% (with registrations streaming in)
This seems notable. The Houston Chronicle reports that over 400,000 new registrations came in between March and the state primaries, and election officials are saying that they are buried in registration requests as the deadline approaches. They should be on track to have the highest levels of registered voters since 2004 (when a favored son and no-longer-the-worst-President was on the ballot).
Perhaps most encouraging, the biggest spikes in registration are in Democratic areas, notably around Austin and Dallas. Also, the specific areas that are seeing the biggest spikes seem to be the suburban areas we need. For example, Williamson County north of Austin has seen a 4% increase in registrations since March. Breaking it down to House races, the larger registration spikes are being reported in TX-22, TX-32, TX-21 and TX-31. These are some of the more promising districts we hope to flip. (I’ll admit it’s been a rough polling week for Texas House races.)
Historical Voter Turnout
The second data point that interests me is historical turnout. Because a big part of our problem in Texas is turnout. As a percentage of registered voters, we are looking at:
2004: 56.6%
2006: 33.6%
2008: 59.5%
2010: 38.0%
2012: 58.6%
2014: 33.7%
2016: 59.4%
This metric helps show why Texas is so challenging for Democrats. In presidential years, our House popular vote margins range from a 12-20 point deficit. (It’s still a pretty Republican place). But in midterm years, we see 30-35 point margins. We get clobbered.
One reason the margins spike so badly is because while both parties lose voters in a midterm, Democratic voter participation rates plummet. What ends up happening is that the Texas midterm electorate gets really white, really old, and pretty male, and well…we be clobbered.
An exception to this rule is 2006, in which our Texas House popular vote margin dropped to 8 points. We should note that 2018 is looking a lot like 2006 in terms of the numbers.
What’s It All Mean?
These numbers should probably be taken as good news for Democrats, especially those in those rough districts where we need every single vote (and the Senate race).
What we are seeing are registration numbers on par with presidential years. But we should assume that turnout will be considerably lower than those cycles. And we should also assume that the scales will tip a little toward blue and a little away from red. So if conventional wisdom holds and these registration spikes are owing mostly to Dem enthusiasm, we could be on track in a lot of these races and some of the outcomes could be unpredictably good in our favor.
The one caveat is that we don’t know the partisan mix of these new registrations (which would be invaluable info, so thanks a lot, Texas state law.) It could very well be that Republicans are enthusiastic too — after all, a lot of their guys are in tough races. (Did I just assume all Republican lawmakers are guys? Hmm. I stand by that sentence). Maybe Republicans are registering in record numbers too.
But based on the information available, specifically which counties are recording the registration booms, this sure looks like something is fundamentally shifting in our favor, at least for this election cycle.
And in a month, I guess we will find out.