North Texas has hundreds of thousands of new registered voters. Will they show up in the primary?

Friday is the last day to early vote in arguably the most important election in Texas this year.

Election Day for the March 5 primary is next week. According to voter registration data reviewed by NBC 5, a wave of new people have registered to vote in North Texas.

Will they show up?

It’s no secret North Texas is booming. Thursday, a room of business and industry leaders with the North Texas Commission were keen on keeping tabs on how the new growth would impact state politics.

“People are moving here, for jobs. We have a lot of companies here. Companies continue to move here,” Chris Wallace, President and CEO of the North Texas Commission told NBC 5.

Wallace says the newcomers to North Texas appear to trend younger and be more diverse. Many of them are coming from other states for booming Texas’ job opportunities.

“It’s a diverse mindset. We have people of diverse backgrounds moving here from the West Coast and East Coast. I think Texas is going to look a lot different in the future. Probably, distant future,” said Wallace.

“The suburbs are changing. Suburban voters are changing and that at least is scary to some people,” said Michael Li, professor at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Li specializes in redistricting, voting data, and elections and says there have been roughly 1.7 million new registered voters in the state since 2020.

According to state and county election data, in the past four years, more than 75,000 new people have registered to vote in Dallas County. In Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties, each of them had more than 100,000 new voter registrations since the March 2020 primary.

History tells us they won’t show up much in the primary because of the state’s notoriously low voter turnout. However, even if a small group of them do, they can have sway over local elections in small districts – such as the Texas House.

“The politics of Texas are increasingly suburban politics and how the suburbs go is how Texas ultimately will go,” said Li.