High voter turnout no barometer of who will win the election, experts say

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Seeing social media posts breathlessly claiming one side is performing better than the other as early voting gets underway?

Not so fast, experts tell ABC13.

Nancy Sims, a political science expert at the University of Houston has studied election trends for years.

Early voting has grown in popularity, Sims said. More people used to vote on Election Day, but now about two-thirds of people vote early, Sims tells ABC13.

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Sims said early voting turnout in urban areas in Texas is between 30-40% higher than it was in 2022 midterms, and 20% higher in rural areas.

Historically, Democrats have voted early, and Republicans have voted on Election Day, but Sims said it is not just traditionally Democratic urban areas showing up at the polls in Harris County now.

"Across the county, even in the very highly suburban, tend to be Republican areas, the turnout is very high at those locations as well, so I'm not sure you can extrapolate from that data," Sims said. "And because we have county-wide voting, you can vote at any location no matter where you live, so it's a little hard to extrapolate."

Sims warned it is too early to determine a win for anyone.

While the election office is counting how many ballots are being cast, it is not releasing who those votes were cast for.

It comes as Harris County has broken early voting records for the first three days polls have been open.

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Data from the Harris County Election Office shows that in the first three days of early voting, 327,691 people cast a ballot either in person or by mail.

That outpaces the 2022 midterms, when 205,743 people voted in the first three days.

Sims says one of the main reasons for the high turnout this year: the competitive and nationally watched U.S. Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico.

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