Early voting tops 43 million as turnout surges in key battlegrounds
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More than 43 million Americans have already voted early before the midterm elections, with Texas again showing massive participation and Hispanic voters helping drive higher turnout across several states despite the usual partisan machinery and election-year anxiety.
With less than a week left before the U.S. midterm elections, the University of Florida Election Lab reports that over 43 million early ballots have been cast, averaging four to five million votes per day — a pace that outstrips most previous contests and suggests a public determined to vote despite the political turbulence. Texas shows the strongest early turnout, having already exceeded its 2022 total by about 1.75 million votes, according to Professor Mike McDonald, who manages the Election Lab database. The state has recorded more than 5.8 million early ballots, positioning it as a pivotal battleground for control of the Senate during Donald Trump's presidency.
Early voting also appears elevated among voters who did not register with a party, though the data does not reveal their candidate preferences. Across the roughly half of states that require party affiliation, 44% of early votes are attributed to Democrats, 31.2% to Republicans and 24.7% to unaffiliated voters. In the three states that collect race information — North Carolina, Georgia and Florida — early ballots from Hispanic and Black voters have risen, while white voter participation remains similar to 2022 levels. McDonald said the pattern fits the reality that communities of colour are more often part of the Democratic coalition, while white voters are more often aligned with the Republican coalition.
"That makes sense because communities of colour are more frequently part of the Democratic coalition, and whites are more frequently part of the Republican coalition," McDonald said.
Texas does not collect party or race data, yet counties along the Mexico border, where Hispanic residents exceed 90%, are projected to outpace their 2022 early-vote totals. Those numbers point to communities that are turning out in meaningful force even where official data remain incomplete.
"When I look at those counties, what I see is some of them are going to beat their 2022 turnout in just the early vote alone," McDonald added.
In the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of all ballots were cast early, half of them by mail. McDonald suggests concerns about postal voting may be influencing the current surge, though he notes there is no concrete evidence linking the rise to specific factors. He cautions that mail ballots face higher disqualification rates due to errors and that some voters might be wary of potential disruptions to the U.S. Postal Service.