HOUSTON — Longtime Trump supporter Stefan Burns is surprisingly the voter Republican leaders worry about.
An antiabortion Christian who believed in the MAGA agenda for years, Burns said that in this election, the most competitive and consequential midterm in recent history, he’s not voting.
“The Republican Party has lost touch with the base,” Burns, 34, a construction project engineer and carpenter in the Houston exurbs, said during his lunch break at a mall food court on Friday, the last day of early voting in Texas.
“Morally speaking, I cannot vote down a party line. Because although abortion is my main issue, it’s not the only one,” he said. “At this point, I guess you could call me a conscientious objector.”
Republican lawmakers are confronting an enthusiasm gap nationally due to the unpopularity of President Donald Trump, wars, data centers, and high gas and grocery prices. Nowhere is the fallout more visible than in Texas, where Trump held Republicans’ midterm convention last month and visited several times this month to rally support.
Republicans have controlled every lever of state government for generations by winning rural counties and significant margins in suburban and urban areas where most voters live. But early turnout shows Democrats — led by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s opponent, state Rep. James Talarico — doing the reverse. Turnout for Democrats has increased in urban areas, and Democrats have posted gains even in conservative rural counties, according to nonpartisan voting analyst Steven David.
David, a former chief operating officer for the city of Houston, has monitored statewide early-vote turnout on his website and compared it with previous elections. While Texas voters don’t register with a party, they pick the primary they want to vote in. So David extrapolated party affiliation from that record to create a color-coded map that shows large swaths of blue across traditionally deep-red areas of the Panhandle, East and West Texas. Places like Montgomery County, north of Houston — where GOP officials refused a state lockdown during the pandemic — are seeing more Democrats vote than during the 2024 presidential election.
“My personal precinct is now very unpredictable. We don’t know how to react to stuff like this. At some point, polling fails,” said David, who lives northwest of Houston in deeply red Tomball. “Republicans are frustrated, and Democrats are motivated, and that’s a bad mixture for anybody who’s trying to run as a Republican.”
A blue wave could be forming, David said, mainly because of a combination of Democratic and Republican anger and apathy. Even Republicans who go to the polls may skip some races — “under votes” — or split their tickets to vote for Democrats, particularly Talarico and Gov. Greg Abbott’s challenger, Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Some Texas GOP voters, particularly those in rural areas upset by data centers and a new statewide voucher program, have said they plan to vote Democratic for the first time.
Among Republicans who voted early but skipped at least one race was Charles, 54, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he works for Harris County. He said he couldn’t vote for Abbott because of how his voucher program diverted funding from public schools, but he couldn’t vote for a Democrat, either.
“I don’t believe in the whole leftist movement, but it was hard to vote for someone who put their own agenda above the rest of Texas,” he said over lunch at Willowbrook Mall food court. “People are fed up with choosing the lesser of two evils.”
Charles said the corruption allegations against Paxton gave him a “moral dilemma,” but he voted for him to ensure Republicans maintain their Senate majority and accomplish Trump’s agenda. He noted that his wife and daughter are voting Democratic.
For months, polls have showed Texas Democrats leading most Republicans at the top of the ticket for the first time in recent history. Abbott, a three-term incumbent, has waged the most active campaign of his career, appearing at the state GOP convention for the first time and at numerous events statewide. Paxton, plagued by corruption and infidelity scandals, has traveled the state but recently canceled several stops on his final campaign tour in deeply red areas. (A campaign spokeswoman blamed scheduling conflicts with last-minute visits by Trump and Vice President JD Vance.)
Turnout during early voting, which began Oct. 19, set records in Texas’s largest urban, left-leaning counties, including Houston’s Harris County, where more than a million voters cast ballots. That’s more than twice the turnout for the last midterm election and almost as big as past presidential elections that normally draw far more voters, according to David’s analysis.
While Republicans and right-leaning independents could show up in force on Election Day, there’s a cold front forecast with rain expected statewide that might dampen turnout, David noted. “Which is another reason Republicans are hitting the panic button.”
Among Republicans concerned by low GOP early-vote turnout is state Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston.
“The Republican deep bench have not turned out as much as their Democrat counterparts have,” said Bettencourt. “This is setting a new trend and standard that we haven’t seen in Harris County or Texas before.”
“As a survivor of a blue wave in 2008, when I was a county official, and watching one in 2018, somewhere between those two years that’s what this turnout looks like to me,” he said, adding that he was even concerned about deep-red areas of northwest Houston.
Independents in those areas could decide the election, according to David’s analysis. Republicans need 54 percent of the independent vote statewide to win, he estimates, and while Election Day independent voters tend to be right-leaning, only about half usually end up voting Republican.
On Friday, Matthew Sullivan, a right-leaning independent voter outside the George H.W. Bush Community Center polling place in the northwest suburb of Spring, said turnout seemed strong, but he wasn’t certain which party was benefiting.
“Most everybody wants to come out and vote, but I’m not sure what direction. There’s a lot of frustration,” said Sullivan, 38, who voted for Paxton but has relatives who didn’t, or who hadn’t voted yet.
At nearby Willowbrook Mall, Burns, the carpenter, predicted disillusioned former MAGA voters like him would stay home, potentially contributing to Democratic victories.
“I have six kids, 16 months to 9 years old, with another boy on the way that I have to feed,” he said. “There’s days I go hungry.”
Burns said his friends and family will not vote Republican this election or in 2028.
“There’s millions of us,” he said, pointing to his worn $50 work boots from Walmart; to his rough hands. “And we’re in consensus: We’re done.”
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