Early Voting Numbers: 47.9 Million Ballots Cast, Smashing the Midterm Record Before Election Day

The early vote has already broken the record it was chasing. A record 47.9 million Americans had voted ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections by midday Friday, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab figures reported Friday — 47,922,669 early votes, surpassing the previous midterm record of about 45.9 million cast ahead of Election Day in 2022.

The surge is strongest where the Senate is being decided. Texas had received more than six million early votes by Wednesday, with in-person turnout running around 50 percent ahead of the same stage in 2022, the reporting said. In states that record party affiliation, registered Democrats accounted for about 44 percent of early voters, against about 31 percent Republicans and 25 percent unaffiliated or minor-party voters — a registration count that does not show which candidates anyone supported. Election Lab director Michael McDonald pointed to rising participation among Black and Hispanic voters in states reporting that data, with particularly strong turnout in heavily Hispanic communities along the Texas-Mexico border, and in Georgia women accounted for 56 percent of ballots cast by Thursday, when the state's early in-person vote broke its midterm record.

The caution travels with the record, and this story carries it plainly: a bigger early vote is not a prediction. Tens of millions more Americans are expected to vote on Tuesday, Republicans have tended to turn out in greater numbers on Election Day in recent elections, and some of the surge is voters casting ballots sooner rather than more voters overall. What the number settles is narrower — participation ahead of Election Day has never been this high in a midterm — and control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump's presidency is what Tuesday decides.