Early Voting Passes 49 Million, a Midterm Record, as the Campaign Enters Its Final Weekend

More than 49 million Americans have already cast ballots in the midterm elections, a record for a midterm, as the campaign for control of Congress entered its final weekend on Saturday. The figure, compiled by the University of Florida Election Lab and reported by Reuters, is up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in the last midterms, in 2022.

The record fell days earlier. The Election Lab had counted 47,922,669 early votes by midday on Friday, already past the 45.9 million early ballots cast in the whole of the 2022 cycle, Agence France-Presse reported. An Associated Press analysis found nearly 10 million more Americans had cast ballots five days before Election Day than at the same point in 2022.

Where the surge is biggest

The increases are sharpest in states with competitive Senate races, the contests that will decide whether Republicans keep their narrow majorities in both chambers for the final two years of President Donald Trump's term. All 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot on Tuesday.

In Texas, more than 6.3 million people had voted early as of Wednesday, compared with 4.2 million at the same point four years ago, a rise of 50 percent, the AP reported. Advance voting was up more than 30 percent from the same point in Maine, Michigan, North Carolina and Kansas. In South Carolina, where voters are choosing a successor to the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, early voting was up 83 percent, and the state passed its entire 2022 early vote total on Monday, with five days of early voting still to go. In Georgia, early in-person voting broke the state's midterm record on Thursday, and women accounted for 56 percent of ballots cast by that day, against 44 percent for men.

In the states that record party affiliation, registered Democrats made up about 44 percent of early voters, against 31 percent for Republicans and 25 percent for unaffiliated and minor-party voters, according to Election Lab figures reported by AFP. Both parties say the surge helps them, and party registration does not reveal how anyone voted. Tens of millions more ballots will be cast on Tuesday.

Two presidents on the stump

The final weekend opened with two presidents making the same request an hour apart on Friday. In Daytona Beach, Florida, Trump told his crowd, "These are the most important midterm elections ever." In Tupelo, Mississippi, former President Bill Clinton campaigned for Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom and borrowed a line from a Republican predecessor. "My friend George Bush once said, 'Democracy is self-correcting.' We are about to find out in Mississippi if it's true," Clinton said.

Trump has no campaign travel scheduled on Saturday, a day that mixes politics with Halloween and college football across the country, Reuters reported. He returns to the trail on Sunday with rallies in Kansas and Iowa, two states where early voting is up roughly 30 percent. The Sunday rallies were restored on Friday, hours after the president said he did not feel he had to go. "I thought this was going to be my last one, Byron," Trump told Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds at Daytona. "I thought this was it. I thought I could relax. Twenty-eight days in a row of this crap is a lot."

What Tuesday decides

A Democratic victory in one or both chambers could open congressional investigations of the Trump administration, which has governed for two years with largely compliant Republican majorities, Reuters reported. The AP reported the election has turned largely on affordability and on the president's unpopularity, while Republicans have voiced concern that unhappy voters may stay home.

Confidence in the count itself is holding. A Reuters and Ipsos poll conducted from September 30 to October 5 found 76 percent of voters confident their ballots will be counted accurately, with confidence about equally high among Republicans and Democrats, Reuters reported.