With one day to go before polls open, nearly 48 million Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab — well above the 45.9 million early ballots cast ahead of the 2022 midterms and a sign of an unusually energized electorate heading into Tuesday's vote.
The surge is sharpest in states hosting marquee races. Texas, where several House and statewide contests are competitive, is running roughly 74 percent ahead of its 2022 early-voting pace; Dallas County alone logged 76,079 ballots on the first day of early voting, more than double the 32,605 cast on the equivalent day four years ago. Georgia set an outright record for first-day midterm early voting, with more than 190,000 ballots cast before polls had even opened statewide.
What the numbers do and don't show
Election analysts are urging caution about reading too much into the totals. Heavy early turnout reflects how many people are motivated to vote and how aggressively campaigns have banked their supporters' ballots — it does not by itself indicate which party is ahead, since both parties have spent heavily this cycle encouraging supporters to vote before Election Day rather than risk bad weather, long lines or a late change of plans. Fact-checkers have repeatedly noted that early-vote composition looked favorable to Democrats in some past cycles that Republicans went on to win, and vice versa.
Even so, both parties are treating the numbers as evidence for their own case: Republicans point to strength in rural counties that lagged behind urban turnout in 2022, while Democrats cite the overall volume as proof their base is more engaged than the generic polling gap alone would suggest. Campaigns in both parties have shifted get-out-the-vote resources toward the small number of voters who have requested but not yet returned a ballot, seen as the last movable bloc before polls close.
A newsroom elsewhere
Trump's own closing schedule has tracked the early-vote data closely; a sister newsroom's dispatch from his dueling stops in Iowa and Kansas described a president leaning on farm-belt turnout to offset Democratic strength elsewhere, even as nationwide early-vote totals climbed past the record his own advisers had been watching warily for weeks. County election offices across the country say they expect final turnout figures, including Tuesday's in-person vote, to be among the highest for any midterm in decades.
