More than 57 million Americans have voted before Election Day, setting a midterm record.
As of Monday afternoon, University of Florida Election Lab figures show that — even adjusted for population growth — this cycle’s early turnout has passed 2022 and 2018, the latter of which went on to become the midterm election with the highest turnout in a century.
Across the 27 states that report party registration, Democrats led by about 3 million ballots. Those counts show how voters are registered, not how they voted — and in several states the fastest-growing group belongs to neither major party.
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But about 90% of that margin came from five states: California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina — and nearly 40% of the margin is thanks to California alone. The 27 states that report party registration for early voting account for about half the national early vote, and key states such as Texas, Georgia, Michigan, New York and Ohio report no party data at all.
During the final days of early voting, the share of ballots coming from registered Democrats declined in most states where party registration is tracked.
Only Kansas has seen a substantial reversal. Democrats led the state’s early vote by about 9,400 ballots on Oct. 28. By Monday, Republicans led by about 11,500 — a swing of nearly 21,000 in a state where the Senate race is rated by The Cook Political Report as a toss-up.
Early voting data isn’t an indicator of where the races could be headed, said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University, but they aren’t always predictive.
“It’s not the case that you can just copy and paste these results into what you’re going to see in the end,” Cooper said.
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Mail-in and in-person early voting have risen in nearly every cycle since the 1980s, said John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. Mail-in voting spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and has come down since, he said. But even after falling from those heights, mail-in voting remains on a long-term upward trend.
What is shifting in 2026 is not whether Americans vote early but how — and none of that, Fortier and others cautioned, would tell you who will win.
Texans Cast 7.7 Million Early Votes
Early voting enthusiasm was clear in Texas, which wrapped up early voting with 7.7 million ballots. That early number alone nearly matches 2022’s entire vote in the state.
Almost all those votes (97%) were cast in person, largely because Texas requires voters to provide a reason to vote by mail. But it’s not just a matter of voter restrictions — Georgia and North Carolina let any voter request an absentee ballot, yet logged more than 95% of their early votes in person this year. Fortier characterized it as a regional preference, “a tradition of voting early in person,” and not a partisan one.
Early voting ran ahead of 2022 in nearly every state he analyzed, said Michael McDonald, who runs the UF Election Lab. McDonald added that registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters cast ballots faster than they did four years ago and Republican voters lagged behind their 2022 pace in some states.
That matters because breaking the early vote record is not the same as breaking the turnout record. The final numbers hinge on who shows up Tuesday, and McDonald is not sure Republicans will.
“If we don’t see Republicans get engaged at the same level as the other groups,” McDonald said, “then we may fall short of that 2018 election.”
Turnout in the predominantly Hispanic counties along the Mexican border outran the state average, he said, pointing to Hidalgo County, where about 92% of the population is Hispanic.
McDonald noted that, despite warnings of the potential presence of federal agents at polling locations, no incidents of immigration enforcement were reported at early voting sites in Hidalgo County or across the state, and Hispanic early voting ran at what he estimated was two to three times the level of prior elections.
North Carolina’s Third Bloc Surges
In North Carolina, the early vote ran well ahead of 2018 and 2022 totals. Pre-election data showed registered Democrats outpaced registered Republicans, but the fastest-growing group was voters registered with neither major party, making it hard to determine who might have the edge.
Democrats lead registered Republicans by about 345,000 ballots, about the same, proportionally, as their edge in 2018 and a substantial improvement over 2022. Since 2018, both parties have lost about four points of share to voters registered with neither party.
North Carolina finished with 2.8 million early ballots, easily surpassing its 2018 and 2022 totals.
What changed is how few of those voters were Republicans: 26%, down from 31% in 2022 and 30% in 2018.
In the previous two midterms, registered Republicans and Democrats each outnumbered North Carolinians who had registered with neither major party. This year that group passed Republicans by more than 260,000. But unaffiliated voters aren’t necessarily persuadable, Cooper said.
“Most unaffiliated voters are not swing voters,” he said. “But most swing voters are unaffiliated voters.”
Mail-in voting fell there, with about 94,000 ballots returned, down 40% from 2022. Catawba College’s Michael Bitzer pointed to “additional hurdles that the state imposed on receiving mail-in ballots,” which he told The Washington Sun meant ballots that would normally have counted did not this year.
The main one was a new requirement that voters seal an inner envelope before sealing the outer one, and failing to do so “would trigger a spoilage.”
North Carolina was an example of a national pattern. Across the 27 states and D.C. that reported both methods in each of the last two midterms, mail fell 13%, while in-person early voting rose 46%.
The decline nationwide is either pandemic habits unwinding or distrust of the Postal Service after the president’s attacks on mail voting, McDonald said, a shift The Sun reported last month among Democratic voters.
Nevada Flipped
Though Nevada’s unaffiliated bloc is smaller than North Carolina’s, the same reshuffling showed up there. The state counted more than 730,000 early ballots, with registered Democrats leading Republicans by about 43,000. In 2022, Republicans had been narrowly ahead.
Nearly two-thirds of those ballots came from Clark County, which holds about 70% of Nevada’s registration. Jon Ralston of The Nevada Independent, who has analyzed Nevada’s early returns for two decades, calls the votes banked there a Democratic “firewall.” Turnout was tracking close to 2022, he said last week, but “what’s not tracking is the composition of the electorate.”
Georgia’s Black Turnout Increases
In Georgia, Black voters cast 32% of early votes, slightly up from 2022 and 2018. Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said Black voters are the largest group of Democrats in the state, and Georgia has more Republicans than Democrats overall.
If Black turnout comes in below their share — roughly 31% of registered voters, Gillespie said — Democrats cannot make up the shortfall with white, Latino or Asian American voters. Charles Bullock at the University of Georgia said that Black voters need to cast about 30% of all ballots in Georgia for it to signal a Democrat could win statewide races there.
Bullock and Gillespie flagged uneven rural turnout. Participation lagged in heavily Republican areas such as northwest and south Georgia, where Trump campaigned in the closing weeks.
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