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Texas Mail Ballot Surge in Biggest Cities
and Most Major Suburbs Boosts Dem Odds

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
October 14, 2020

The number of Texans who cast their ballots in the mail before the start of the early voting here on Tuesday soared compared to four years ago in the San Antonio and El Paso areas and major suburban meccas that have trending Democratic rapidly with President Donald Trump as the king of the GOP.

But Harris County set the bar at a record level when the number of people who voted in person there today was 90 percent higher than it had been in the 2016 presidential election that produced a historic turnout in Texas where Democrat Joe Biden has a shot at snapping the GOP's 44-year winning streak at the top of the ticket.

The cumulative mail ballot count plummeted, however, in heavily Republican Montgomery County on the suburban outskirts of the Houston area while falling to a level in Collin County that's difficult to believe based on the early postal voting tally at Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs' office today.

The Montgomery County mail turnout tally on the first day to vote early in person raises the specter that President Donald Trump might have persuaded GOP loyalists that casting votes via the Post Office could make them look like election thieves.

The mail ballot count on day one of early voting in Texas plummeted 221 percent compared to 2016 in Montgomery - the last of the major urban counties here that's safely red in a state where Democrat Joe Biden is trailing Trump by less than 2 points in polls that have been taken since the president's bout with the coronavirus and the superspreader events surrounding it.

But a 417 percent plunge in mail voting in Collin County up to now could - if the SOS total there today is accurate - be a double-edge blade in a suburban destination where the number of Republicans and Democrats could be fairly even in the election on November 3.

Democrats nonetheless can expect to have a significant advantage in the mail vote in Texas where they've been promoting it vigorously while Trump portrays postal balloting as devious scheming by Democrats in the first presidential election in a pandemic in the history of the United States where the virus is starting to spike again.

The state agency in charge of elections here has not reported the number of ballots that have been mailed or hand-delivered in Harris County - the largest Texas metropolitan area where an all-time record turnout that favors the Democrats appears to be inevitable. No mail ballots have been reported in Hidalgo County up to now as well.

Dallas and Tarrant counties recorded increases of 33 percent and 46 percent respectively in the count of ballots that have been received when sized up against the opening day for early votes in 2016. But the number of mail ballot voters in Denton County on the northern edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth area vaulted 158 percent while shooting up 167 percent in suburban Williamson County on the north end of the Austin area according to numbers that were released today by the secretary of state.

Nueces and Cameron counties on the southeast Texas coast posted jumps of 47 percent and 30 percent in the pre-early vote mail ballot tally as major population centers that are heavily Hispanic and dominated by Democrats like Bexar and El Paso counties.

The number of cumulative mail ballots that were recorded today in Bexar County was 149 percent higher than it had been in 2016 when President Donald Trump carried Texas with a nine-point win over Democrat Hillary Clinton.