Black voters backed Democrat James Talarico by wide margins in Texas and Harris County, as the county set a midterm record for ballots cast.
Statewide, Black voters made up about 12% of the electorate and went 90% to 8% for Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton in the exit poll.
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Black women backed Democrats 93% to 6%, and Black men 86% to 12%.
Talarico won the race 55% to Paxton’s 43%.
In Harris County, plurality-Black precincts gave Talarico 86% of the vote, a 74-point margin.
In the final statewide poll conducted by Texas Southern University in late October, Black likely voters favored James Talarico over Ken Paxton by 82% to 16%. Midterm results indicate that Black voters surpassed the expected support. The New York Times’ validated estimate of the Texas electorate puts Black Texans at 91% to 8% for Talarico, a 16-point increase from 2024.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa won 85% of the vote there. Those precincts accounted for about 10% of the votes cast in each race.
Talarico carried Harris County by 33 points.
The support was not assured.
Black voters had overwhelmingly favored U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary, and Talarico announced a $25 million Black voter turnout initiative in September. Historically Black neighborhoods were among those with the sharpest early-voting gains.
Record early vote
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Harris County voters set a midterm record before Election Day. Unofficial precinct data suggest the surge continued through Nov. 3, pushing total ballots past the totals from the last two midterms. The share of registered voters who turned out, however, stayed close to 2018 levels.
Early voting closed Oct. 30 with more than one million ballots counted, according to the Harris County Clerk’s daily record. Of those, over a million were cast in person, and 44,661 came by mail. It is the earliest number of ballots the county has recorded in a midterm, about 39% of its roughly 2.7 million registered voters.
The final day was the biggest, with more than 126,000 in-person voters, topping the 104,656 who voted on opening day.
The gap with past midterms is large. In 2018, the previous record, 855,711 people voted early, or 36.6% of registered voters.
In 2022, early and mail voting totaled about 752,491.
This year’s early total is about 26% above 2018 and roughly 44% above 2022.
On Election Night, County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth said the midterm “resembled presidential in many different ways,” although it did not reach presidential numbers.
Polls closed at 7 p.m., but voters still in line at some of the county’s 623 vote centers were allowed to cast ballots. Hudspeth also noted that ballots ran past 1,100 contests in much of the county, which slows reporting.
Unofficial precinct data for the U.S. Senate race shows 1,392,280 ballots cast across 1,224 precincts, out of 2,761,770 registered voters.
“We have to start treating Black voters as swing voters.”
James Talarico, U.S. Senate-elect
That is a turnout rate of about 50.4%. If those figures capture all ballots, about 77% of voters cast theirs before Election Day.
Compared with previous midterms, final 2022 turnout in Harris County was nearly 43%. In 2018 it was about 52%.
Harris County also lagged other large counties in early participation.
Secretary of State data show that 39% of registered voters in the county voted early, compared with 42% in Dallas County, 48% in Tarrant County, and 48% in Collin County. Tarrant and Travis had cast about 48% of the vote by the end of early voting.
