Texas saw high voter turnout for the primary elections on March 3, with about 1 in 4 registered voters casting a ballot. The state also saw more Democratic primary votes than Republican. However, Denton County didn’t match those trends.
Statewide, over 2.1 million Republican ballots were cast, while Democratic primary voters cast over 2.3 million, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
Out of about 667,800 registered voters in Denton County, about 171,000 cast a ballot in the primaries, according to numbers from Denton County Elections Administration. That’s about 25.6% voter turnout overall.
Texas has open primaries, which means voters can decide which party’s primary election they want to vote in. However, a voter can’t cross party lines to vote in the other party’s runoff in the same election cycle.
Republican primary voters cast the majority of ballots in Denton County with about 88,120 votes total, while Democratic voters accounted for about 82,890 ballots.
Percentagewise, 13.2% of Denton County voters cast ballots in the GOP primary, while the Democratic primary had a 12.4% turnout.
Despite still having a lower turnout than the Republicans in 2026, Denton County Democrats nearly tripled their turnout this year when compared to both the 2022 and 2024 primaries.
Both parties in Denton County saw higher turnout this year than in 2022 during the most recent midterm primary. That year, 11.9% of voters cast ballots in the GOP primary and 4.75% in the Democratic primary.
At the state level in 2022, Democrats cast just over 1 million ballots while Republicans cast nearly 2 million.
In the 2024 primary ahead of the presidential election, Republicans saw about a 14.9% turnout in Denton County while Democrats had about a 4.55% turnout.
Statewide in 2024, Republicans cast twice as many ballots as Democrats. While Republicans cast over 2.3 million ballots, Democrats hovered under 1 million.
In a State of the County Address that streamed on YouTube on Wednesday, Denton County Democratic Party Chair Delia Parker-Mims discussed the importance of voter turnout in Texas. She said that over 8 million registered voters in Texas did not vote in 2024.
“Texas is not red,” she said in the video. “Texas is not blue. Texas is a nonvoting state.”
Parker-Mims encouraged voters to go to the polls despite exhaustion from both personal and national stress.
“We cannot let exhaustion defeat democracy,” she said.
The Denton Record-Chronicle reached out to the Denton County Republican Party for comment on the primary election but did not receive a response by Monday evening.
Primary runoffs take place May 26.
CAMILA GONZALEZ can be reached at 940-566-6830 and cgonzalez@dentonrc.com.
For more than 120 years, the Denton Record-Chronicle has been Denton County’s source for locally produced, fact-based journalism. Your support through a tax-deductible donation or low-cost subscription is vital to our ability to deliver credible, relevant, unique coverage of our community.
