Americans have already cast more early ballots in the 2026 midterms than in any midterm on record, and Election Day has not arrived yet.
By midday on Friday, October 30, the University of Florida's Election Lab — the tracker overseen by political scientist Michael McDonald and the figure most newsrooms work from — counted 47,922,669 ballots cast by mail or in person, according to Agence France-Presse. The previous midterm record was 45.9 million, the total cast before Election Day in 2022.
Independent trackers, counting a little differently, put the number higher still. On Point Politics reported 49,553,367 ballots across 47 reporting states as of Sunday, November 1 — about 26.4 million in person and 23.1 million by mail.
Who has returned a ballot
In the states that record party registration with the ballot, registered Democrats account for about 44% of early votes, Republicans about 31%, and unaffiliated or minor-party voters about 25%.
That split is worth reading carefully. It records the party a voter is registered with, not the candidate the voter chose, and it covers only part of the country: of the 24 states that report registration for early voters, the reported split is narrower — roughly 40% Democratic to 33% Republican, with 27% independent or third-party.
A record early vote is also not, by itself, a forecast of record turnout. Part of what the number measures is a shift in when Americans vote, as more states have widened mail and in-person early voting over the past decade.
The state picture
- Texas: more than 6 million early votes by Wednesday, according to official figures, with in-person turnout running about 50% ahead of the same point in 2022. Harris County had logged about 862,700 ballots by October 28, against roughly 564,500 four years earlier.
- Georgia: early in-person voting broke the state's midterm record on Thursday. Women made up 56% of the ballots cast through that day, men 44%.
- North Carolina: early voting up nearly 37% on the same point four years ago, per the state election board.
- South Carolina: passed its entire 2022 early-vote total on Monday, with five early-voting days left.
- Kansas: advance ballots running roughly two-thirds ahead of 2022 levels last week, per the secretary of state's office.
- Florida: about 4.5 million early ballots.
"Georgians continue to head to the polls in record numbers because they trust the system," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Thursday.
What is on the ballot Tuesday
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up, along with 35 seats in the Senate and governorships in 36 states. The result decides which party controls Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump's second term. The Senate races in Texas, Michigan and Alaska are the most closely watched; the latest polling puts all three within the margin of error.
Reporting from Agence France-Presse, the University of Florida's Election Lab, the On Point Politics early-vote tracker and Gray Media's Week Ahead in Washington.
