(The Center Square)–A record 40% of registered voters, 7.7 million people, voted during early voting in Texas, according to Secretary of State data.
Instead of voting on one day, Election Day, Texans have 13 days to vote, 12 of which are during an early voting period. This year, early voting went from Oct. 19-30.
There are a record 19 million Texans registered to vote this election, according to Secretary of State data.
By comparison, in 2014, 4.7 million people voted, or 34% of registered voters, according to an analysis of election data by the Austin-based Ryan Data & Research firm.
The company doesn’t use modeling information, only data from public SOS registration lists and a list of voters reported by each county on each day of early voting, the company says.
“More people voted early this year than all votes cast in 2014, but we also have five million more registered voters on the registration rolls this year than we did 12 years ago. We also were only 400,000 votes away from surpassing the total for 2022 as well,” Derek Ryan with Ryan Data explained in an emailed statement to The Center Square.
He also said that on Election Day, “we are going to see a record number of votes cast for a midterm election in Texas.”
By comparison, in 2022, 74% of registered voters voted early. In 2018, the ratio was 80%. In 2024, it was 85%, he said. The ratios were larger in these elections but there were fewer registered voters and the total numbers were less.
The majority of Texans who voted early are in
Harris County saw the highest number of early voters at more than one million, according to SOS data. The county is seen as a bellwether for political shifts in the state. Previously a Republican majority county, over the past 10 years it’s shifted left. The majority of voters polled say the state and country are heading in the wrong direction, The Center Square reported. Democrats are expected to make large gains this election despite Gov. Greg Abbott vowing to help turn the county “dark red.”
The next largest number of early votes were cast in the state’s largest counties: Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis, according to SOS data. Tarrant County, the state’s last large county with a Republican majority, could flip blue on Election Day.
Nearly half of all registered voters in Collin County voted early, according to the data. The county is home to Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who iwho trails in polling in the U.S. Senate race.
The majority of people who voted early were women, 55%, compared to 42% of men.
“Women having an advantage over men isn’t out of the ordinary in Texas. There are almost one million more women registered than men. At the completion of early voting in 2018, women made up 54% of all votes cast,” Ryan notes.
Nearly 60% of voters over age 65 voted early, according to the data with nearly 2.5 million votes cast, or 32% of early votes cast. “This is a larger share than they had in 2024 after early voting (29%), but smaller than their share in 2022,” the analysis notes.
Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 made up nearly one million of the votes, or 13%.
Hispanic voters accounted for nearly 20% of early voters, nearly 1.5 million.
When comparing early voting data to primary voter data, there are 2.7 million people who have not voted who are among the most likely voters, according to the analysis. In this category, Republicans have a 289,717-vote advantage over Democrats if they vote on Election Day, according to Ryan’s analysis.
Early voting was not without controversy.
The SOS was sued for problems with a new voter registration system, which officials acknowledged created a backlog of 500,000 registration applications not reaching county registrars. The issue was reportedly fixed ahead of early voting, The Center Square reported. This case is ongoing.
In Harris County, several convicted felons were arrested over the weekend on charges of illegally voting, and last week county officials were sued for running “get out the vote” ads targeting voters by race. The Office of Attorney General investigated both cases. County officials agreed to stop running the ads and were blocked from running them again in the future, The Center Square reported.
In south Texas, an independent investigation found there were 3,500 defective voter registrations in south Texas. The region is where allegations of voter fraud have been made in Zapata County during the Democratic primary elections this year and in 2024, The Center Square reported. County officials who are currently under criminal investigation for alleged voter fraud are running for reelection Nov. 3.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
