More Than 43 Million Americans Have Already Voted in the Midterms as Early Voting Surges Past 2022 Pace

More than 43 million Americans had already voted in the 2026 midterm elections by Thursday, 29 October, according to figures from the University of Florida Election Lab reported that day, with five days still to go before Election Day on Tuesday, 3 November. The total, compiled from official state data, puts the 2026 early vote well ahead of the pace recorded at the same stage in 2022 and on course to pass the early-voting total for that midterm election altogether.

The Election Lab, run by Professor Michael McDonald at the University of Florida, counted 40,532,275 early ballots by Wednesday, 28 October, according to a summary of its state-by-state files. That figure alone had already passed the roughly 40.1 million early ballots banked by the final weekend of voting in 2022, and it sat about 8.5 million ahead of the 2022 count five days before Election Day. A separate count published on Thursday by Votebeat, also drawing on the Election Lab, put the national total at about 42 million, while reporting based on the same Election Lab data put it above 43 million later on Thursday. The differences reflect different snapshot times in a count that was rising by four to five million ballots a day, according to Professor McDonald.

The scale matters because the midterm elections will decide control of Congress for the remaining two years of President Donald Trump’s presidency. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot, alongside gubernatorial elections in 36 states, according to CBS News reporting cited in coverage of the early-vote figures. Democrats are heavily favoured to win back the House majority, according to elections forecasters, while several Senate races remain closely contested. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter shifted 19 House races in the Democrats’ direction on 23 October, according to States Newsroom reporting, and listed 17 races as toss-ups, 12 of them defended by Republicans.

Texas has produced the largest single-state early-vote total so far. More than 5.8 million ballots had been cast in Texas by Thursday, according to the Election Lab figures reported that day, about 1.75 million more than the state’s entire early-vote total in 2022. Texas Secretary of State data through Tuesday, 27 October, recorded 5,695,302 early votes, including 5,467,834 cast in person and 227,468 returned by mail. Texas, which does not register voters by party, is home to a Senate race rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report between Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic state representative James Talarico, and President Trump campaigned in the state on Tuesday, according to States Newsroom.

Other battleground states have also reported unusually large early totals. More than 2.1 million voters had cast early ballots in Georgia by Wednesday morning, according to the Election Lab, in a state where the Senate and governor’s races are both being closely watched. Georgia’s in-person early vote alone later passed 2.29 million, a midterm record, according to a summary of state data. Virginia’s early vote had already topped its full 2022 midterm early total, with 1,256,823 ballots reported, driven by heavy turnout in Northern Virginia counties. In Michigan, more than 1.3 million people had voted early by Tuesday, and in Ohio nearly 1.2 million, according to the Election Lab figures reported by States Newsroom.

In the states that record party registration, registered Democrats account for the larger share of the early electorate so far. Figures reported on Thursday showed Democrats at about 44 per cent of early ballots in those states, Republicans at 31.2 per cent and voters with no party affiliation at 24.7 per cent. An earlier snapshot, covering roughly 16 million early voters in 27 states that record party affiliation, put Democrats at 45 per cent, Republicans at about 31 per cent and unaffiliated voters at 24 per cent, according to the Election Lab data reported by States Newsroom on 27 October. Professor McDonald has repeatedly cautioned that registration is not a vote: the data show the party a voter is registered with, not the candidate they chose, and they say nothing about how unaffiliated voters voted.

An ABC News analysis of voter records in Texas and Georgia, using data from the voter-records firm L2, found a similar pattern through a different method. In states without party registration, L2 models likely partisanship from information such as primary participation. That analysis, published on 28 October, classified 51 per cent of Texas early voters as likely to vote Democratic and 45 per cent as likely to vote Republican, and 54 per cent of Georgia early voters as likely Democratic against 38 per cent likely Republican. The analysis also found stronger enthusiasm among less-frequent voters who lean Democratic, particularly in Texas, compared with 2022. ABC News stressed that the L2 data do not indicate who any individual voted for and say nothing about who might yet turn out on Election Day.

The composition of the early vote is changing in another way. More voters are casting ballots in person at early-voting sites and fewer are voting by mail, according to a Votebeat analysis published on 29 October. Votebeat put national turnout at about 42 million on Thursday, slightly ahead of 2022 at the same point, and found that in North Carolina, Georgia and Wisconsin, early in-person voting was up an average of 35 per cent compared with 2022, while voting by mail and drop box was down about 35 per cent. In North Carolina, early in-person voting was up 41 per cent while mail voting was down 33 per cent, according to state data cited by Votebeat. In Georgia, in-person early voting was up 10 per cent and mail voting down 47 per cent. In Wisconsin, in-person voting had risen 53 per cent from 2022, with a 22 per cent drop in returned mail ballots.

The shift extends a trend that began during the pandemic. About 43 per cent of voters cast ballots by mail in 2020, at the height of Covid-19, according to the US Election Assistance Commission, cited by Votebeat. That figure fell to 30 per cent in 2024. A recent Pew Research poll found that 15 per cent of Democratic voters planned to vote by mail this year, down six percentage points from 2024, alongside a fall in Democratic confidence in voting by mail from 85 per cent in 2024 to 64 per cent in the latest poll, according to Votebeat’s account of the Pew findings.

President Trump has repeatedly attacked voting by mail, including a statement earlier in October, reported by ABC News and cited by Votebeat, that “there’s a lot of cheating in vote by mail”, even though he has himself cast ballots that way. His administration’s attempts to restrict mail voting for this election through executive orders were blocked by the courts, most recently when the US Supreme Court in September kept in place a lower court’s order blocking a plan that would have given the US Postal Service more power to regulate voting by mail, according to Votebeat. It was unclear until the Supreme Court ruling in mid-September whether mail voters would face new restrictions in this election, Votebeat reported.

Election experts cited in the coverage offered two explanations for the move towards in-person voting. Professor McDonald suggested one was a post-pandemic reversion to more normal patterns, and another was that concerns about the Postal Service, including Mr Trump’s threats to “monkey around” with it, had persuaded some voters to vote in person instead, according to States Newsroom. Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College in Oregon who directs the Elections and Voting Information Center, told Votebeat that messaging from an influential voice, amplified by others, had moved many Republicans away from mail voting, and that Democrats and Republicans had reacted differently to Covid-19 and to voting advice ever since. Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Votebeat that concerns about the Postal Service and the Trump administration were likely the main reason for the decline in mail voting, while noting other factors could also be at play.

For context, the 2018 midterm election recorded the highest turnout for a midterm since 1914, according to Professor McDonald. About 122 million Americans voted in total in the 2022 midterms, and nearly 46 million of them voted early, according to the Election Lab figures reported by States Newsroom. Professor McDonald said on 27 October that, on the data then available, 2026 was running “at least even” with 2018, adding: “If the voting continues through Election Day, we would be somewhere around that number.” He also cautioned that the surge might partly reflect voters casting ballots earlier rather than additional voters turning out at all, a warning echoed by ABC News, which noted that much of the apparent surge in Texas and Georgia consisted of voters who would probably have voted later in the early-voting period or on Election Day itself.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A surge in timing is not yet a surge in outcome

The most important discipline in reading these numbers is also the simplest: an early ballot is a ballot cast early, not a ballot counted for a particular candidate. Every serious tracker says the same thing in different words, and it is worth repeating because the headline totals invite the opposite conclusion. The Election Lab counts participation. It records whether a registered voter cast a ballot, by what method, and, in some states, under what party registration. It does not record a choice. The L2 modelling used by ABC News goes one step further and estimates likely partisanship, but a model is not a result, and ABC News itself framed its findings as enthusiasm and composition, not as a forecast.

That distinction cuts both ways. A Democratic lead in party-registration shares among early voters does not guarantee Democratic victories, because Election Day voting has in recent cycles tilted Republican, as Professor McDonald has noted, and because the voters who have not yet voted include many who will vote on 3 November itself. Equally, a high early total does not guarantee high overall turnout. If millions of people who would have voted on Election Day simply voted a week earlier, the final turnout may look much like 2022 even while the early-vote record falls. The honest reading of the 43-million figure is therefore narrower than the excitement around it: Americans are voting earlier, in larger numbers, and with more visible enthusiasm in the pre-election period than four years ago. Whether that becomes a high-turnout election will only be known after Election Day.

Texas is the story inside the story

If one state explains why this early vote feels different, it is Texas. The state has already banked more early ballots than in the whole of the 2022 early-voting period, and it did so while its in-person early-voting window was still open — Texas in-person early voting ran from 19 to 30 October. The raw total is partly a function of size: Texas reported a record 19,041,684 registered voters for this election, according to reporting on the opening of early voting. But the growth rate is what stands out. A state that has long ranked near the bottom of national turnout measures, ranking 43rd among the 50 states for the share of voting-age citizens registered to vote after the 2024 election, according to Census Bureau survey data cited in analysis of the Texas figures, is now producing the country’s largest early-vote pile.

Texas also concentrates the limits of the available data. Because the state does not register voters by party, every partisan reading of its early vote depends on modelling — primary history, modelled partisanship, or both. The ABC News analysis found a 14-percentage-point swing towards modelled Democratic voters compared with the completed 2022 early vote, and a much more Democratic modelled split among voters with no participation in the previous four federal elections. Those are composition signals, not vote counts, and they compare a partial 2026 count with a completed 2022 count, which makes direct comparison fragile. What is not fragile is the participation fact itself: more than one in five registered Texans had already voted before the final days of early voting, and the Senate race that may help decide control of the chamber is being fought in a state where the electorate is visibly expanding its early-voting habit.

The move from the mailbox to the polling place

The second major story in the data is a change in how Americans vote, and it may outlast this election. The pandemic pushed mail voting to 43 per cent of all ballots in 2020. By 2024 it had fallen to 30 per cent. In 2026, in the three states Votebeat examined in detail, in-person early voting is sharply up and mail voting sharply down. That is not a uniform national pattern — Pennsylvania, for example, showed a smaller decline in Democratic mail-ballot requests than in Republican and independent requests compared with 2024 — but the direction in the battlegrounds is consistent.

The causes are contested, and the evidence points to a mixture rather than a single explanation. Part of the shift is mechanical: as Covid-19 receded, the emergency conditions that made mail voting the default for many voters receded with it. Part of it is political: sustained attacks on mail voting from the President, combined with uncertainty until mid-September about whether new restrictions would apply, gave some voters a practical reason to choose a method they could watch being accepted. Part of it is institutional: slow Postal Service delivery and a rise in rejected mail ballots, noted by Votebeat, have made some voters, including Democrats whose confidence in mail voting has fallen sharply, prefer a drop box or a polling place. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, even rewrote its ballot instructions to advise voters to use a drop box to avoid Postal Service problems, according to Votebeat. The practical consequence is an election administered more in person than the last two cycles, with longer early-voting queues, heavier demands on polling-place staffing, and a counting process that may be faster in states that count in-person ballots quickly — and slower where mail ballots, still numbering more than 19 million returned nationally, must be processed under state-specific rules.

What the party-registration lead can and cannot tell us

The Democratic lead in party-registration shares deserves careful handling, because it is simultaneously real and easy to misread. In the states that record party, Democrats lead Republicans by roughly 13 percentage points in the early electorate reported on Thursday. That lead is consistent across snapshots: 45 per cent to 31 per cent on 27 October, 44 per cent to 31.2 per cent on 29 October. It is also consistent with the modelled analysis in Texas and Georgia, where Democrats are doing better among less-frequent voters than in 2022.

None of that, on its own, predicts the result. Party registration describes the voter, not the vote, and in every recent cycle a meaningful share of registered partisans has voted for the other party’s candidates or split a ticket. Unaffiliated voters, about a quarter of the early electorate in the states that record party, are invisible in a partisan reading until they are counted. And the early electorate is not the whole electorate: habitual voters — people who voted in all four of the last four federal elections — made up 60 per cent of the Texas early vote and 67 per cent of the Georgia early vote in the ABC News analysis, a larger share than in the completed 2022 early vote. That suggests the early surge is, so far, disproportionately composed of the most reliable voters voting earlier, with less-frequent voters a smaller, if more Democratic-leaning, part of the mix. The campaigns’ real question is not who leads the early count, but whether the less-frequent voters who have voted early so far are the leading edge of a broader expansion, or an early-arriving minority whose effect will be diluted by Election Day turnout.

A high-turnout midterm would rewrite the final days

If turnout does finish near the 2018 level — the highest midterm turnout since 1914 — the consequences go beyond any single race. A high-turnout midterm historically punishes the President’s party, and forecasters already favour Democrats to retake the House. The Cook Political Report’s shift of 19 House races towards Democrats on 23 October, and its list of seven Senate toss-ups spanning Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas, describe a map in which control of the Senate, not just the House, is genuinely contested. In that environment, the final days of campaigning matter differently: get-out-the-vote operations chase a shrinking pool of unvoted supporters, legal fights over ballot deadlines and counting rules gain urgency, and both parties must decide how much to invest in Election Day turnout versus chasing the remaining early voters.

There is also a longer-term implication. Early voting was once treated as a convenience for a minority. In 2026 it is becoming the way a large share of the country votes, with 97 per cent of the electorate having the option to cast a ballot before 3 November, according to an election-administration summary of state rules. If the in-person early-vote habit hardens, future campaigns will be fought earlier, polling will need to model an electorate that has largely decided before the final weekend, and election administrators will need to staff and fund a voting period that lasts weeks rather than a single day. The 43-million figure is a snapshot of a single election. The shift it captures — earlier, more in-person, and more closely watched — may be the more durable story.

What to Watch Next

1. The final Election Lab totals before Election Day. With four to five million ballots landing each day, the national early total will rise sharply through the final days of early voting. The comparison that matters is not only the headline total but the pace against 2022 at the same number of days out, state by state.
2. Texas on the last day of early voting. Texas in-person early voting ended on 30 October. The final Texas total, and the modelled composition of its late-arriving early voters, will show whether the state’s surge broadened beyond habitual voters or stayed concentrated among them.
3. Election Day turnout on 3 November. The decisive unknown is how many supporters of each party who have not yet voted turn out on the day itself. Professor McDonald’s caution — that Election Day usually tilts Republican — will be tested directly against the early-vote lead.
4. Counting timelines in the battlegrounds. States count mail and early ballots under different rules and at different speeds. Expect results in some close races to remain uncalled for days, and watch for disputes over ballot deadlines, drop-box rules and Postal Service delivery.
5. The forecasters’ final ratings. Any further shifts from the Cook Political Report or other forecasters in the final days, and any late polling of the generic ballot and the Senate toss-ups, will show whether the campaigns believe the early-vote signals point to a wave, a narrow Democratic House gain, or a split outcome.

Sources

• University of Florida Election Lab — 2026 Early Vote tracker (primary data, compiled from state election offices)
• Votebeat — More voters are going to polling places to cast ballots in midterm as voting by mail wanes in some states (29 October 2026)
• North Dakota Monitor / States Newsroom — Early voting surges in midterm elections as millions cast their ballots (27 October 2026)
• ABC News analysis (syndicated) — Democratic enthusiasm seen among less-frequent voters in key states of Texas and Georgia (28 October 2026)
• The Daily Letter — Early vote 2026: 40.5 million ballots cast, far ahead of 2022 pace (29 October 2026)