More than 52 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a record for a midterm election and well above the nearly 46 million people who voted before Election Day in 2022, according to Reuters, citing figures from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
Tuesday’s vote will decide control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term, with all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats on the ballot. Republicans are defending a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a narrow edge in the House, and the surge in early ballots has left both parties fighting over a shrinking pool of voters who have not yet cast a ballot.
The total was still rising when the latest figure was reported on Sunday, November 1. The Election Lab had put the count at 51.31 million as of 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, according to reports based on its tracker, and more ballots were still arriving by mail and at early voting sites in states where voting remained open. Different totals published during the weekend reflect different reporting times, not different counts of the same ballots.
In-person voting has driven much of the increase. More than 28 million people had already voted early in person by Saturday, compared with about 20.5 million across the whole early voting period in the last midterms, according to the Election Lab figures reported by several outlets. That shift matters for how the record is read: a ballot cast in October can replace a ballot that would otherwise have been cast on Election Day, so a larger early total does not by itself prove that final turnout will rise by the same margin.
Texas leads the surge
Texas has recorded the largest early vote of any state, with more than seven million people having already voted early, about 1.5 million more than in the whole 2022 cycle, according to the Election Lab figures reported by The Guardian. In Harris County, which includes Houston, an Associated Press analysis found 862,700 people had voted by Wednesday, compared with 564,500 at the same point in 2022.
Georgia also passed its own milestone before its early voting window closed. The secretary of state’s office reported that 2,294,275 people had voted early in person by 1:35 p.m. on Thursday, already above the state’s 2022 total of 2,289,951, with one day of early voting still to run at that point.
Elsewhere, an Associated Press analysis found early voting running well ahead of the same point in 2022 in several battleground states. South Carolina was up 83 percent, Maine was up 44 percent, and Michigan was up about 32 percent, in the first midterm in which early in-person voting is available statewide there after voters approved the measure in November 2022. North Carolina ended its early in-person voting at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
Party registration is not a vote count
In the 27 states that record the party registration of early voters, registered Democrats have cast more ballots so far than registered Republicans. The Election Lab data put Democrats at 43.1 percent of early voters in those states, compared with 31.8 percent for Republicans, while other reports based on the same data counted 10.7 million registered Democrats and 7.8 million registered Republicans who had voted by Saturday morning.
Those figures describe registration, not vote choice, and they cover only the states that publish that breakdown. Election Lab director Michael McDonald told Bloomberg that early voters have tended to favour the Democratic Party in past elections, a pattern he said has held across election cycles. Analysts cautioned that millions of voters are still expected to cast ballots on Election Day, and that Election Day returns have favoured Republicans in some recent elections.
The Cook Political Report shifted its ratings for 12 House contests toward Democrats on Friday, according to reports of its update, and classified 18 House races and seven Senate contests as toss-ups. Polls and forecast models have continued to show Democratic advantages in the generic congressional ballot, though analysts and officials caution that early totals do not reveal which candidates the voters who have already cast ballots actually chose.
What is firmly established is participation, not outcome. Early ballots are not counted by candidate before Election Day in most states, and the national total says nothing about which candidates the early voters selected. With the early voting window now closed in many states and still open in a few through the weekend, attention turns to Tuesday, November 3, when polls open across the country and the remaining tens of millions of voters cast their ballots in person.
Results in the closest Senate and House races may take days to settle, as mail ballots are counted and late-arriving votes are processed. Until then, the one firm conclusion from the early voting numbers is about participation itself: Americans are voting earlier, and in greater numbers, than in any midterm election before.
