Storms expected to hit parts of Texas and Kansas on election day

Soggy, dreary weather is expected to hit the central U.S. as voters head to the polls Tuesday, but experts said the impact on the electoral outcome is expected to be minimal.Still, weather could become a closely watched factor in a few tight races in Texas and the Midwest. On Monday, a storm system is expected to move through the central U.S., with hurricane-strength winds, the risk of tornadoes, hail and heavy rainfall. “We’ve got some moisture that’s moving up into parts of Texas and Oklahoma and up into Kansas and Missouri, and with that moisture, we’re going to have a chance of storms,” said Evan Bentley, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “We have plenty of energy available to support severe weather, including damaging winds and perhaps a few tornadoes.” Bentley said North Texas and Oklahoma could see straight-line winds in excess of 75 mph on Monday, raising some concern about power outages. “There’s always concern, when we have the potential for winds of 70 to 80 miles per hour, of having impacts on infrastructure, such as power lines,” Bentley said, though he added that this type of weather was not uncommon in the region. The weather’s effect on voter turnout will be watched closely by campaigns seeking to draw as many supporters as possible to polling places. Kansas and Texas, which could both be affected by the storms Monday, have hotly contested Senate races. The storm system will move east Tuesday, with heavy rainfall possible in Mississippi, Missouri and western Tennessee. On Election Day, “scattered flash floods are possible” in the lower Mississippi River valley and into areas such as Memphis, said Jennifer Tate, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. Much of the rest of the central U.S. — from East Texas to the Midwest — can expect wet, dreary weather on Election Day. “There still could be some locally heavy amounts in Iowa,” Tate said of rainfall. “Hopefully not anything that would impact travel too much.” Election Day weather on the West Coast looks fairly pleasant, with pockets of rainfall in Northern California. The East Coast looks clear, also, with some rainfall expected in Florida and Maine. Rainfall has been shown to have a modest effect on voter turnout in analyses of voting data. Researchers have analyzed past elections for trends in how unusually heavy rainfall might have suppressed voter turnout in historical elections. Brad Gomez, an associate professor of political science at Florida State University, was part of a team that analyzed presidential elections from 1948 to 2000. “What we found was that for every inch of rain that a county received above its average amount of rainfall, voter turnout went down about eight-tenths of 1 percentage point,” Gomez said.But Gomez said there have been institutional changes in voting that make it hard to estimate whether that effect will carry through today. “Many states started to adopt early voting, and, of course, some states, like Washington and Oregon, started to adopt mail-in voting,” Gomez said. “Nationally, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission estimates that today only about 37% of Americans actually vote on Election Day.”That means weather disruptions affect a much smaller slice of voters now than they did before the year 2000. Early voting trends could mean weather disruptions are more impactful in some states than others. Gomez said only about 20% of Texans cast their ballots in person on Election Day in the 2024 election. But that number was about 60% in Minnesota and about 45% in Kansas — so weather disruptions could be more meaningful in those states. Thomas Fujiwara, an associate professor of economics at Princeton University who has studied the issue and written about it in academic papers, said the effect of rainfall on turnout has decreased over time. “It was stronger in the ’50s and ’60s, and it’s weaker now,” Fujiwara said. “We shouldn’t think of rain being a major driver.” Both Fujiwara and Gomez said it would be hard to predict which party stands to gain from rain, given the relatively recent changes to how people vote.