Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune's daily newsletter keeping readers up to date on Texas' most important news.

Fewer Texans voted earlier this year compared to 2020 — particularly in the state's largest cities, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data.

More than 9 million Texans either voted in person during the two weeks of early voting or returned their mail-in ballots by Nov. 1, state data shows. That’s 48.6% of all registered voters. In 2020, 9.7 million, or 57.2%, of registered voters voted or cast early voting.

The delay is largely due to a dramatic decline in mail-in voting. Approximately 8.7 million Texans voted early in both 2020 and 2024. However, 937,870 Texans voted by mail in 2020, while 347,652 voted by mail this year.

Current data is not final and may be incomplete. Counties can accept mail-in ballots until Wednesday. And each county is responsible for self-reporting, and in some cases counties don't release their numbers or report them late. And a direct comparison to early voting in 2020 comes with a big caveat. At the beginning of 2020, Texans had three weeks to vote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this year it was only two weeks. And four years ago, more emphasis was placed on postal ballots.

Election day is Tuesday.

Despite the lag in voter turnout, the total number of Texans who voted is staggering. More people have already voted than in all previous presidential elections combined other than 2020, according to veteran consultant Derek Ryan, who is publishing a must-read report on early voting.

Four years ago, more than 11 million people voted in Texas, a high for a state that has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the United States

Democratic turnout appears to have lagged throughout the early voting period, a trend first seen in the first three days of early voting.

Harris County Democratic Chairman Mike Doyle said turnout was good, but it wasn't shocking that the county had a lower voter turnout this year than in 2020 because of the pandemic and the extra election week. Harris County, to which Houston, which also includes Houston, is the most populous county in the state.

“That means we have some ambitious goals for tomorrow,” Doyle said. “But we’ve been driving pretty damn hard on the road for a long time.”

Doyle is cautiously optimistic and said a good day for Democrats would be about 300,000 voters. He added that they expect about half a million additional voters in Harris County on Election Day.

Democrats have hoped to oust U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz this year in what would be the latest attempt to end their decades-long losing streak in national elections. Texas' rural and suburban counties have long been Republican strongholds, with voter turnout higher than in the state's urban centers such as Dallas, Austin and Houston.

Ryan, a GOP campaign consultant, said Democrats need to see higher turnout in the five most populous counties on Election Day to win a statewide election.

“President Biden got 59% of the vote in these five counties four years ago, but only 25% of the vote in the most rural counties in the state,” Ryan said.

On Monday, 58 solid red counties and six border counties broke their 2020 voter turnout record. Zapata County, where about 8,000 people live south of Laredo, saw the largest increase in its voter turnout: 14 percentage points.

No fast-moving counties like Colin County in North Texas or big blue counties like Travis or Bexar exceeded their turnout in 2020. In fact, the state's largest counties all saw similar declines in their turnout, between 10 and 12 percentage points.

Solidly Republican counties have nearly matched their 2020 early voting totals, which may explain the trend that Republicans appear to vote early more often than Democrats based on their voting history.

It's something of a reversal from 2020, when former President Donald Trump expressed doubts about the process and encouraged his voters to only go to the polls on Election Day. According to Ryan's records, 2.5 million voters who cast ballots during the two weeks of early voting had previously participated in a Republican primary. In comparison, 1.6 million voters took part in a Democratic primary. Texas does not track voter registration by party. The use of voting history in political party primaries provides a substitute for general elections.

“The electorate so far this cycle looks very similar to 2020,” Ryan said.