More than 50.5 million early votes had been cast across the United States by Saturday morning, putting the total nearly 5 million ahead of the full early-vote count from the 2022 midterm elections with three days left before Election Day. The surge is already visible in key states, from Texas to South Carolina, Kansas, Maine and Michigan.
That is why the early voting results are drawing so much attention now: the numbers are not just high, they are high before the final stretch even begins. In states that collect party affiliation information, 10.7 million registered Democrats and 7.8 million registered Republicans had voted so far, but those labels do not show how people actually voted, only how they are registered.
Texas alone had more than 7 million early voters, about 1.5 million more than it had at the same point in the 2022 midterms. In Harris county, 862,700 people had voted by Wednesday, up from 564,500 at the same point in 2022. That county mattered in the 2024 election too: Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump there by nearly 6%, and Colin Allred carried it by roughly 11% over Ted Cruz in the Senate contest.
The increases are not limited to Texas. Early voting was up 83% in South Carolina, 34% in Kansas, 44% in Maine and 32% in Michigan compared with the 2022 midterms. Those are the kinds of jumps that can matter in a year when Republicans were defending a 53-47 Senate majority and the midterms will decide the balance of the US House of Representatives and Senate for the final two years of Donald Trump's second term.
The unresolved question is not whether people are voting early. They are. It is how much of this surge will hold when ballots are counted and whether the states showing the biggest gains now will also be the ones that shape the result on Tuesday.
