AUSTIN — A surge of voters at the polls painted Texas red and delivered the state to Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday, according to early returns.

Trump captured 51.2 percent of the vote to 45 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to early returns posted to the Secretary of State’s website. The Associated Press and other news outlets called the state for Trump based on exit polling.

“This is a real event,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “People want to vote because they know it’s important.”

Turnout was high, as evidenced by the number of people voting before Tuesday’s balloting. Forty-six percent of registered voters in the state’s 15 largest counties cast early ballots, up from 39 percent four years ago, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

But while numbers were high, enthusiasm was muted for the presidential standard-bearers.

“I know I have to choose one,” said Walber Ortiz, 48, who voted for Clinton at the Fiesta supermarket on the east side of Interstate 35 in central Austin, where wild iguana goes for $18.99 per pound. “Both person’s no good. She’s a little bit better — a little bit.”

Oritz, an airport shuttle driver and native of Colombia, became a U.S. citizen last month. He said he’s opposed to Clinton’s support of abortion rights.

But he chose her over the New York businessman, anyway, as did John Martinez, 48, a maintenance technician at the local Presbyterian seminary, who also voted at Fiesta.

Martinez voted for Clinton in hopes of a return of the good economic times he remembers from the 1990s, when her husband, Bill Clinton, was president.

“She has her own ways but the mentality’s the same,” he said. 

That’s the problem for Woody Roberts, who voted for Trump but otherwise pulled the lever for Libertarians, except in a county commissioner’s contest where he voted for a Democrat.

“I just couldn’t see the Democrats back in the White House, taking the silverware,” said Roberts, 75, a retired marketing consultant and TV executive. “The Clintons are a corrupt family.”

Julie Kennedy, 27, who works at a restaurant and voted at the east-side market, said she voted for Clinton because she hopes to see a woman elected president.

“It would go to show that we’re equal,” she said.

Her friend, Lindsey Rock, 30, said if she woke up Wednesday to news that Trump won the election, she would probably would have a panic attack “then start thinking pretty seriously about moving to another country.”

Matthew Brown, who voted at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church across town in the affluent Tarrytown neighborhood,

said he supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. 

“I said at the beginning of the election that I wouldn’t vote for either,” said Brown, 28, of Trump and Clinton. “I’ve just gotten beaten down.” 

Brown, a designer and fabricator, ended up voting for Clinton.

“That doesn’t mean I’m excited at all,” he said. “I just want the president to be saying nice things instead of straight-up evil things.”

A 10-minute drive away, where about 50 people were waiting to vote at the University of Texas Co-Op, Robert Morrow, a former Travis County Republican chairman, was holding forth on the sidewalk.

Morrow was wearing a jester’s cap and holding a sign that read “Trump is a child molester.”

Morrow lost his party chairmanship in August when he registered as a write-in presidential candidate, in violation of party rules.

“Hillary Clinton is a criminal,” he said. “Donald Trump is a lunatic.”

Robert Ussery, 53, shared the same stretch of sidewalk with Morrow. He handed out fliers for a website promising a $100,000 reward to anyone who can prove man has been to the moon.

“I don’t support the system,” said Ussery, who’s retired from the real estate business and lives in Lockhart, east of Austin. “I wouldn’t vote at all.”

On the west mall at the University of Texas, Jason Poindexter, 20, a business major from Dallas, passed out fliers about a talk on sexual assault and its prevention. 

A Republican, Poindexter said this year’s options were “not great.”

Regardless of the outcome, he said, “you’ll have half the country upset.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.