Americans are voting early in numbers never seen in a midterm. By midday on Friday, 47,922,669 ballots had already been cast in the November 3 elections, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab — more than the entire early vote of the last midterm, when 45.9 million ballots were cast ahead of Election Day in 2022. The record fell with four days of voting still to go.
The man behind the count, the Election Lab's Michael McDonald, marked the moment in his midday update on Friday: at least 47 million people had already voted in the 2026 general election. The surge is concentrated where it matters most — the battleground states that will decide control of Congress — and in the states that record party registration, registered Democrats currently make up a larger share of the early electorate than Republicans. That comes with the trackers' standing warning: party registration does not show how anyone actually voted, and early-vote figures do not predict who wins on Tuesday.
The state numbers show the scale of it. Texas passed six million early votes by Wednesday, with in-person turnout running about half again higher than in 2022. In Georgia, the Secretary of State's office reported on Thursday that early in-person voting for a midterm had already broken the state's 2022 record — before Friday, the final day of early in-person voting, had even begun; the state's early total passed two and a half million.
For voters, the record cuts both ways: nearly 48 million Americans have already locked in their choices, beyond the reach of anything the final weekend can bring — and the races for the House and Senate will now be decided by whoever is left. Campaigns that spent months planning for a low-turnout midterm are instead facing a presidential-year-sized electorate, and Tuesday's turnout operation, not October's arguments, is what remains.
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