For the first time in history, Texas has topped 16 million registered voters and is adding voters faster than its population grows heading into the 2020 presidential election.

With the voter registration deadline for the March 3 primaries just two weeks away, the state is already on the brink of having 2 million more registered voters than it did just four years ago when President Donald Trump was first elected.

“What you’re seeing is a true transformation of the Texas electorate,” said Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt, a voter advocacy group focused on registering young Latino voters and getting them involved in politics.

He said despite all the barriers Texas has put in place to depress voter registration and voter turnout, groups like his are drawing younger and more diverse voters, which is making the politics of Texas more reflective of its demographics — about 40 percent of the state’s population is Latino, census data shows.

Since 2017, the population in Texas has grown by about 5 percent. But the state’s voter registration has grown about 8 percent during that period. The increase is even more dramatic in urban areas such as Harris County, the state’s most populous county. While Harris County’s population has grown an estimated 4 percent since 2014, its voter registration has jumped 14 percent.

In Bexar County the population has grown an estimated 11 percent since 2014, while the voter registration has jumped 19 percent.

More Information Texas population and voter registration totals 2014: Population of 26,876,429. Registered voters: 13,601,324 2016: Population of 27,782,691. Registered voters: 14,238,436 2018: Population of 28,702,243; Registered voters: 15,182,885 2020: Projected population of 29,677,668; Registered voters: 16,106,984 Source: Texas Secretary of State, Texas Demographic Center Voter registration deadline approaches To vote in the March 3 presidential primaries, new voters must register to vote by Feb. 3. Voters who are not sure if they are registered they can check online at https://www.votetexas.gov. Feb. 3 is also the deadline to change the address on a voter registration. Address changes made within the same county are effective 30 days afterward. Voters who move to a new county must submit a new voter registration application. People can also register to vote with the local county voting registrar. In Harris County, voters can apply with the Harris Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar Office by calling (713) 274-8200 or visiting online at www.hctax.net In Bexar County, voters can submit an application with the Bexar County Elections Department, call 210-335-8683 or visit online www.bexar.org.

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The voter registration surge is dramatic compared to what’s happened in Texas historically. It took from 2002 to 2012 for Texas to go from 12.1 million to 12.9 million voters. Since 2012, Texas has added over 3 million voters, with the bulk of those coming in the past four years.

Arellano said the numbers show that groups like his are finding the people who have been marginalized in Texas politics for decades.

“We are beginning to make history by connecting with potential voters who have been overlooked for far too long,” Arellano said.

Last year, Republicans launched two high-profile voter registration efforts as they seek to keep their majority in the Legislature, and their control of every statewide elected office.

While Texas doesn’t require voters to register by party, Texas Democratic Party officials say their internal data shows that the voter gains are largely due to voters that skew their way — younger and more diverse.

Cliff Walker, Deputy Executive Director of the Texas Democratic Party, said as the state has looked more competitive with each election, that in turn has drawn even more younger and diverse voters to sign up, which then makes the state still more competitive. In other words, the success begets more success, he said.

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Texas has added nearly a million voters just since Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke came within 219,000 votes of being U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.

Republicans don’t have to be told that they are losing the voter registration game in Texas.

In early 2018, Gov. Greg Abbott had a program called “Abbott University” to train volunteers. At those meetings, strategists were ringing the alarm that left-leaning voter registration groups were having a lot more success than they expected, particularly in Harris County. It was an apt warning. When November hit, every statewide Republican candidate lost Harris County, including Sen. Cruz and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who are from the county. In addition, more than 70 judicial races down-ballot flipped into Democratic hands.

Now Republicans are getting more aggressive, too. In 2019 a handful of GOP donors started a new super PAC called Engage Texas with the goal of educating and registering Texas voters. The Republican Party of Texas also announced its own initiative called the Volunteer Management Project, which includes longtime Texas GOP strategist Karl Rove, and aims to engage in “nuts-and-bolts party building such as voter registration” for the 2020 election cycle.

Rove said Democrats still have a long way to go before they can claim Texas as a blue state.

“They don’t have a shot as long as Republicans use this as an opportunity to get our act together,” Rove said in an interview in Houston in December.

Rove said the Republican engagement project is already boosting the number of volunteers and driving up membership in groups like the Texas Federation of Republican Women, which are key to boosting turnout and voter registration efforts.

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For Democrats, frustrations with registering voters in Texas hit a head after 2012. With the state’s demographics continuing to diversify and get younger, voter registration was stagnant. From 2010 to 2012, Texas actually lost 30,000 registered voters even as the state’s population grew.

In 2013, former campaign operatives who worked with President Barack Obama launched a group called Battleground Texas. The mission was to more aggressively register voters in Texas, a place that has a history of making it difficult to register to vote. That was a tall task, given a 2011 Texas law that significantly toughened voter registration rules to require people wanting to register voters to go through county-specific voter registrar training; the law also blocked non-Texans from joining that work.

So to register voters statewide, a volunteer would be forced to attend 254 different trainings. Texas also does not accept online voter registration applications — the paperwork must include a handwritten signature, and that signature cannot be a copy, digital signature or photo of a signature.

But slowly Battleground Texas and other groups started to make headway. Other groups have joined the cause, with Jolt, The Lone Star Project and Be One Texas among them.

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Those groups only see more potential as the state grows more diverse and younger. Latinos are on target to become the largest population group in Texas as soon as 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And every year about 300,000 Texas high school students become eligible to vote, according to Battleground Texas data.

“Voter registration is increasing even while Republicans are trying to do everything they can to slow down registration efforts,” said Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project.

The Democrats point to last year’s botched purge of the voter rolls as an effort to tamp down the surging registration.

In January, the Texas Secretary of State’s office launched an effort to purge almost 100,000 Texas voters, saying they may have been non-U.S. citizens. But the data was flawed and failed to account for the 50,000 immigrants who are naturalized each year in Texas and are eligible to vote.

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Arrellano said the fact that 90 percent of the people on the purge list had Hispanic surnames made it clear to him what was happening, though Republicans insist they were not targeting Hispanic voters, and that the purge was aimed at preventing voter fraud.