Biden vs. Trump: Live Updates on 2020 Election and Texas Voting

Texas, a 2020 jump-ball state once considered a layup for Republicans, is shattering turnout records, with the number of early in-person and mail-in ballots now exceeding the total number of votes cast in the 2016 election.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic and one of the most bitterly contested presidential races in the nation’s history, early-voting turnout has been enormous across the country. As of Friday morning, more than 83 million votes had been cast, representing more than 60 percent of the total ballots cast four years ago, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Elections Project.

But Texas, the nation’s second most-populous state, is the first to cross the 100 percent threshold. The Texas secretary of state’s office reported Friday morning — the last day for early voting in the state — that 9,009,850 people had already voted by mail, dropped ballots in boxes or showed up at polling sites. Four years ago, a record-breaking 8,969,226 Texans voted in the election.

The Texas increase has been fueled by huge turnout in urban, Democratic areas, like Harris County, home to Houston, but rural counties that have traditionally voted Republicans have also seen significant jumps in voting.

Polls show a near dead-heat in the state, with a slight edge for President Trump.

Though Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, is making a late swing through the state today, with visits to Houston, McAllen and Fort Worth, the Biden campaign has not put significant time or money into the state, arguing that it is a bad investment: Texas has multiple expensive media markets and is not an essential stop on Mr. Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes.

Early-voting patterns, especially in big cities like San Antonio and Austin, suggest that the underlying dynamics of the race are less like 2016, when Mr. Trump won by 9 percentage points, than the 2018 midterms, when Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, narrowly beat Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat.

“There’s no doubt that it’s a real race,” Mr. Cruz said recently.

The surge in turnout comes despite the fact that Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Trump ally, has limited the number of drop boxes to one per county, an order that greatly advantages low-population counties where Republicans predominate.

The drop-box limit has been offset by big new investments in election infrastructure in Harris County and elsewhere. Harris County officials opened 10 drive-through voting sites across the county, fighting off an effort by the state Republican Party to shut them down. A separate action by the governor, extending the statewide early voting period by six days, has also contributed to the increases.

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