What Early Voting Can Reveal About the 2026 Midterm Elections So Far

Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the 2026 elections, and while polling has pointed to a good night for Democrats, there are plenty of pressing questions that won’t be answered until election night, or beyond.

It can be tempting to turn to the early vote for answers to these questions. But in most cases, early voting data is limited in how much insight it can offer. The data tells us which voters have turned out, not for whom they have been persuaded to vote — to say nothing of how voters’ behaviors have shifted since the last election cycle. And it offers no insight into what turnout will be like on Election Day.

Nonetheless, there are some early voting takeaways worth monitoring.

Around 80 percent of Texans cast their ballots ahead of Election Day in 2024, making the early vote a more useful assessment of the political environment there than in many other states. And Texas has drawn a great deal of attention in these midterms, with polls in the state’s Senate race showing James Talarico, the Democrat, tied with or narrowly leading Ken Paxton.

Voters in Texas do not register with a political party, but the state does record voters’ participation in a partisan primary. By that metric, Democrats are faring well in the advance vote: In votes cast through Saturday, Democratic primary voters outnumbered Republican primary voters by around two percentage points, based on New York Times estimates.

But that wouldn’t be entirely unexpected. More voters cast ballots in the state’s Democratic primary in March than did so in the concurrent Republican primary, a striking feat. Among the largest caveats with early voting data, though, is that participation in a party’s primary is no guarantee of a vote for that party in a general election — and around one in four voters have no history of primary participation.

More than four million ballots have been cast in Texas thus far, a strong turnout showing that more closely resembles a presidential election than a midterm. Turnout in the state’s Hispanic areas has been particularly high — through the end of Saturday, majority-Hispanic counties were running at around 90 percent of their 2024 pace, compared to 82 percent statewide. (Midterms often see a much starker decrease in turnout.)

While few swing states have seen numbers as robust as Texas, turnout is generally higher across the board than it was in the 2022 midterms, with the largest increases in less populous states that are more competitive than usual this cycle, like Iowa, Kansas and Maine. (Maine, like Texas, is running at around 80 percent of its 2024 pace.)

The increase is particularly notable in Kansas, which had highly competitive races for governor and attorney general in 2022. With a competitive Senate race this year, turnout is up by around 50 percent, and registered Democrats make up a greater share of the electorate than at this point in 2022 or 2024. The results may not necessarily be representative: Johnson County, which leans Democratic and is the most populous county in the state, typically constitutes around 25 percent of the statewide vote, but makes up nearly half of the advance votes thus far.

Georgia and North Carolina, where polls have shown Democratic Senate candidates with wider advantages, are among a handful of states that include race in their voter files, and a large majority of ballots in each are cast before Election Day. That makes them particularly useful for examining how Black voters are turning out relative to past cycles.

The racial composition of the electorate doesn’t neatly correlate with election results, but even a small increase in Black vote share would be a strong sign for Democrats — Times Voter Trends estimates that Kamala Harris won around 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia and North Carolina in 2024.

In both states, the share of Black voters casting their ballots ahead of Election Day has paced ahead of 2022 and 2024 totals, and has largely remained consistent throughout the early voting period.