What this early voting surge means for election results

The big run to the polls continued today after early voting kicked off with quite the rush on Monday. Fox 7 Austin's chief political reporter Rudy Costi joining us from the newsroom with how the turnout is being interpreted. Rudy. Hi Alec. Okay we know it's a surge but we don't know exactly if this surge is going to be sustainable. Travis County had a record-breaking day Monday for the first day of early voting. There were more than 41,000 in-person votes. A similar surge apparently happened all across the state, too. Today, on day two of early voting, it was another busy day in the Austin metro. Around noon, a few locations in Travis County had wait times exceeding 15 minutes. And in Williamson County, the rush was not quite as big, but it was steady, especially in population centers like Taylor, Round Rock, and Leander. On the Battleground Texas show today, Rice University political analyst Mark Jones joined our discussion about the early numbers from the early voting what you have is what's clear from polling is a group of Democratic voters who are chomping at the bit to vote they pretty vehemently oppose Donald Trump they want to support Democratic candidates up and down the ballot and they couldn't wait to get out and vote this cycle what tends to happen though is that we were seeing probably a cannibalization of later early voting from these first couple of days And that we'll see it begin to taper off as we get towards the end of this week and early next week before picking up towards the end of the early voting period. We can also see a cannibalization of all voting in the early vote where simply fewer people end up voting on election day. We saw that in the primary period where so much of the vote occurred early that on election day it was a real drop off from what people might have been expecting. And we didn't see the ultra record turnout that we were expecting, especially on the Democratic side. Now, Harris County led the state for having the most day one early voting. They smashed their own midterm record with more than 104,000 ballots. Montgomery and Fort Bend counties there in the Houston area also reporting strong early in-person participation. Day one in Dallas County saw more than 73,000 voters. Now, the best total vote for a midterm election statewide happened back in 2018, and that number was 53%. percent. The top presidential year total election turnout happened in 2020. The number for that time 66.7 percent. So there's a little perspective on that, Alec. Rudy, President Trump returns to Texas this time next week and by that time most of the GOP base may have voted. So couldn't that visit maybe backfire? Yeah, there's a couple of schools of thought of that. We talked about that during our battleground show today. You know, Mark Jones thinks that the base will already be based out and voted out. The general idea for the visit, though, is to get moderate Republicans who maybe are thinking about sitting this whole election out to get them to come out and also maybe a long shot pass, a Hail Mary, if you will, for independent conservative voters who have yet to decide what they're going to do. Alec. Rudy Costi, thank you.