Hot Contests Raise Primary Turnout Expectations High

Texans can begin casting votes ahead of the March 1 party primaries as of yesterday, February 16th. Elections officials are expecting a high turnout driven by competitive presidential races in both major parties.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart told the Tribune’s Jay Root that requests for mail-in ballots there are already at record levels.

 

“All told, Stanart said he expected close to 400,000 people will cast primary ballots in the state’s largest county. Whereas Democrats dominated interest in 2008, Stanart predicted three-quarters of the turnout in Harris County will be on the Republican side, where native son Ted Cruz and New York billionaire Donald Trump are duking it out at the top of a shrinking list of GOP candidates.”

In 2008, participation in the primaries surged as a result of the high-profile showdown between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The number of votes cast in the Democratic primary more than tripled from four years before — from about 840,000 votes to close to 2.9 million votes.

Turnout that year was significantly higher also on the Republican side with almost 1.4 million votes cast.

“Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said the record high turnout in 2008 remains an ‘outlier’ that will be hard to surpass,” Root wrote. “But he said the fierce competition in the GOP race will make 2016 one for the history books — and could approach the levels set eight years ago.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

This article originally published in Texas Tribune.