A few notes on Tuesday’s presidential election results:
A record 8.93M Texans cast votes in this general election, and 6.17M registered voters didn’t. The number of votes cast is 10.5% more than the previous record set in 2008 and 11.7% more than in 2012.
Just over 59.1% of voters cast ballots for the presidential candidates and certified write-in candidates, up 0.55% from 2012 and down 0.37% from 2008. Turnout was the seventh highest and fifth lowest for a presidential election since 1976.
Not quite 43% of the estimated voting-age population voted, the fourth lowest figure for a presidential race since 1976. About 51% of the estimated voting-eligible population voted, 1.2% ahead of 2012 but 2.7% behind 2008.
The 6.17M non-voting registered voters nominally exceeds the previous record for a presidential election set in 2004, but non-countable write-in votes and blank votes likely mean the 2004 mark still stands. The number of non-voting registered voters exceeds the 2012 figure by 519K and the 2008 figure by 674K. For comparison, 9.31M registered voters sat out the 2014 gubernatorial election.
Around 11.9M voting-age Texans did not vote in this election. Of those, an estimated 8.6M could have. Both of those figures are the highest for any presidential election in state history.
A record 6.56M votes were cast early. Early voters comprised a record 73% of all voters, up 10 percentage points from 2012 and 22 percentage points from 2008.
The number of voters going to the polls on Election Day fell to a level not seen in a presidential election since 1960. Just 15.7% of registered voters cast ballots on Election Day. The 2.37M Election Day voters is lower than every even-year general election (including gubernatorial elections) since at least 1996 except for 2010 (2.33M) and 2014 (2.16M). Nearly 3M voted on Election Day in 2012, so Election Day is down 20% from 2012 and 40% from 2000.
Donald Trump’s 4.68M votes are the most ever for a presidential candidate in Texas. Hillary Clinton’s 3.87M votes are the most ever for a Democratic candidate for any office.
Trump’s 9.1-point win over Clinton was the closest presidential election in the state since 1996.
Gary Johnson’s 283K votes were the most for a minor party or independent candidate since 1996, and his 3.2% is the highest ever for a Libertarian or Green Party candidate.
Donald Trump won 227 of the state’s 254 counties. Trump received more votes than Mitt Romney in 219 counties. Measured as the percentage of the head-to-head vote against the Democratic candidate, Trump improved over Romney’s performance in 205 counties. He received at least 80% of the vote head-to-head against Clinton in 117 of those counties.
Hillary Clinton won 27 counties, one more than Obama won in 2012 and one less than Obama in 2008. Clinton won Fort Bend and Kenedy Cos., which Obama lost in 2012, and lost Jefferson Co., which Obama won in 2012. Obama won Brewster Co. in 2008, but he lost it in 2012 as did Clinton in 2016. John Kerry won 18 counties in 2004. Clinton received more votes than Obama did in 2012 in 81 counties. However, her margin of victory was smaller than Obama’s in 13 of the 25 counties they both won.
Measured as the percent of the vote head-to-head against Clinton, Trump received 29% of the vote to Clinton’s 71% in counties where at least 75% of the voting-age population is Hispanic/Latino. This is 2% below Romney’s performance in 2012, but Trump received nearly 15K more votes in those counties than Romney. Clinton received 67K more votes from those counties than Obama in 2012. That is less than the 74K-vote bump she received from Travis Co.
In 2014, Wendy Davis won 19 counties, and Greg Abbott’s head-to-head vote percentage exceeded 80% in 125 counties.
Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman received the most votes any candidate has ever received in Texas history. Women have received the three highest-ever vote totals for Republicans and two highest-ever vote totals for Democrats.
Our preliminary analysis of data from 100 counties indicates that 63% of votes cast for president were straight-ticket ballots, which is about 1 percentage point higher than in 2012 and 7 percentage points higher than in 2008.
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