With less than a week to go before Americans decide who controls Congress for the next two years, more than 43 million people have already cast a ballot — a pace that election researchers say could push turnout past the record set in the 2018 midterms, which itself broke a mark that had stood since 1914.
Data from the University of Florida Election Lab shows four to five million early votes being cast every day this week, a far higher rate than in most previous midterm cycles. Professor Michael McDonald, who runs the lab's tracking database, said Texas has posted the highest above-average turnout of any state so far, having already surpassed its entire 2022 early-vote total by roughly 1.75 million ballots. More than 5.8 million Texans have voted early, cementing the state's unlikely status this cycle as a genuine Senate battleground.
Democrats Lead Early, but the Picture Is Incomplete
In the roughly half of states that require voters to declare a party affiliation when registering, 44% of early ballots have come from registered Democrats and 31.2% from registered Republicans, with the remaining 24.7% cast by voters with no party registration. Republican early-voting numbers are running close to their 2022 levels, McDonald said, while Democratic turnout is up — though the party affiliation of a ballot says nothing about who it was actually cast for.
Three states that require voters to list their race — North Carolina, Georgia and Florida — are showing a rise in early voting among Black and Hispanic residents compared with 2022, while turnout among white voters is tracking roughly flat. "That makes sense because communities of colour are more frequently part of the Democratic coalition, and whites are more frequently part of the Republican coalition," McDonald said. In Texas counties along the Mexican border, where more than 90% of residents are Hispanic, some counties are on pace to beat their entire 2022 turnout from early voting alone.
A Habit Formed in the Pandemic
Early voting's dominance is a legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic, when states dramatically expanded both in-person and mail early-voting options. In 2020, more than two-thirds of all ballots nationwide were cast before Election Day, split roughly evenly between mail and in-person voting. McDonald said voters are increasingly choosing to vote in person even when they vote early, and are returning ballots sooner than in past cycles — a shift he suspects, without hard data to confirm it, is linked to lingering voter anxiety about mail-in security and possible interference with the US Postal Service.
Local officials are already logging records of their own: the city of Minneapolis said this week it had set an all-time early-voting record for a non-presidential election. Early voting will begin tapering off over the weekend as states start closing the option ahead of polls opening on Tuesday, November 3 — a date that will settle not just which party holds the Senate and House, but the fate of marquee races from Texas, where Democrat James Talarico is challenging Republican Ken Paxton, to South Carolina, where a once-safe Republican seat has turned into a dead heat in the race's final days.
