Turnout in this week of early voting for the Republican senate runoff in Texas is looking to be more than double what it was last year. Some say high turnout will favor Dewhurst over Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, in a sense “diluting the Tea.”
The Dallas Morning News crunched the numbers:
Two days of early voting for Tuesday’s GOP runoff election in urban counties of Texas has yielded more than twice as many votes as it did last spring.The runoff’s early-vote period, which ends Friday, is just five days — less than half the length of the May 14-May 25 early voting window that preceded the May 29 primary. So to get an early vote equal to that cast in the primary, you have to have participation that’s more than twice as heavy.But many have predicted a steep drop-off in voter participation in the runoff. So far, that’s not borne out.Figures released by Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade’s office on Wednesday — and crunched byThe Dallas Morning News to get comparables — show that in the 10 counties with the most registered votes, 31,622 votes were cast on Monday; and on Tuesday, 36,255.
This has some people scratching their head, like Raz Shafer from American Majority:
Late Thursday afternoon, two Dewhurst endorsements were announced, State Senator Dan Patrick, who founded the Tea Party Caucus in the Texas Senate, and Comptroller Susan Combs who is angling for a 2014 Lieutenant Governor run.
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