After a week of early voting, Elections Administrator Michele Carew said Monday that Bexar County is likely to see more votes cast in this November’s midterm election than there was in the 2024 presidential election.
The fast-growing county has added more than 45,000 new voters since 2024 — when turnout in blue cities across the country famously fell short of supporting Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Still, political strategists say it’s highly uncommon for midterm turnout to rival that of a presidential year, and reflects an unusual amount of money being poured into an election to influence local voters.
As of Sunday evening, nearly 301,000 early in-person and mail votes had been counted in Bexar County.
Early voting runs through Friday, and polls will be open once more from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for Election Day on Nov. 3.
In the 2024 presidential election, roughly 763,000 voters were cast in Bexar County, or about 59% of the county’s 1.3 million registered voters.
“It’s very unusual,” said San Antonio Republican strategist Kelton Morgan. “Typically you look for something around 50-55% turnout in this kind of off-year election, and closer to 65-70% turnout in a presidential, so yeah, this is heavy. But you’ve had damn near a billion dollars spent just on the U.S. Senate race.”
Political analysts across the state have been urging caution in reading too much into early turnout numbers.
Texas doesn’t have registered party affiliations, but right now voters with a history of participating in Republican primaries have cast fewer early votes than those with a history of voting in Democratic primaries.
That gap could still close closer to the election.
Morgan said local Republican candidates should be concerned about what they’re seeing so far in Bexar County, but the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from early turnout data was that an unusual amount of money is being spent here right now.
Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico and gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa need to not only eat into their opponents’ share of the rural vote to be successful, but also run up the score in the state’s urban centers.
“They’ve got to drive up huge numbers in urban counties to have any chance, so they’re spending a ton of money in places like San Antonio to do that,” Morgan said.
That’s at the same time, the San Antonio-area has three congressional races drawing big money and attention to its media market, and both parties are fighting to win over the Latino voters who swung toward President Donald Trump in 2024.
“If there’s one place anywhere in the country, certainly in the state, that is a hotbed for that for competition for Latino votes, it’s San Antonio and South Texas,” Morgan said. “So yes, there’s a lot of money being invested in a whole lot of different efforts here.”
