With early voting underway across the country ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, Democrats are posting encouraging participation numbers in several battleground states, although analysts caution that the figures provide an incomplete picture of what will happen on Election Day.
Democrats have relied heavily on absentee and early voting during recent elections, frequently accumulating an advantage before Republicans turn out in greater numbers on Election Day.
But here’s the new wrinkle for the 2026 cycle: Republican voting habits have changed, particularly as GOP campaigns increasingly encourage supporters to cast ballots early rather than waiting until November 3. More GOP voters are casting ballots early, directly challenging Democrat early voters in several parts of the country.
Writing in National Review, Noah Rothman argued that Democrats may now be experiencing their own version of the early-voting anxiety that Republicans confronted during previous election cycles.
The initial numbers contain some positive signs for Democrats, particularly in states featuring competitive Senate and gubernatorial races.
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More than 700,000 Americans had already voted across at least 30 states by October 1, according to a CNN analysis, with Democrats accounting for larger shares of absentee ballot requests in several important states than they did at the comparable point in 2024.
In Iowa, Democrats represented 67 percent of absentee ballot requests, compared with 54 percent at the same point two years earlier.
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Pennsylvania Democrats accounted for 66 percent, up from 62 percent, while Democrats represented 57 percent of requests in Maine compared with 53 percent in 2024.
Those figures, however, measure ballot requests rather than completed votes and provide no guarantee that voters requesting ballots ultimately returned them or supported their party’s candidates.
They also capture only an early portion of a voting period that will continue for weeks, making broad conclusions about final turnout particularly difficult.
Republicans have meanwhile increased their emphasis on voting before Election Day after years of internal disagreement about absentee ballots and other alternatives to traditional same-day voting.
President Donald Trump was frequently critical of mail voting during earlier elections, but Republican organizations have increasingly urged voters to take advantage of legally available early-voting methods rather than surrender that portion of the electorate to Democrats.
Significant partisan differences over those methods nevertheless remain, with an April Pew Research Center survey finding that 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents supported allowing voters to cast early or absentee ballots without providing a specific reason.
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Only 34 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed, down considerably from the 57 percent of Republicans who supported unrestricted early or absentee voting in 2018.
Another complication is that mail voting and early in-person voting increasingly produce very different partisan patterns.
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Research compiled by the early-voting project Who Shows Up found that mail voters have generally favored Democrats during recent presidential and congressional elections, while early in-person voters have moved substantially toward Republicans.
During the 2024 election, early in-person voters favored Republicans by approximately 15 percentage points, according to the project’s analysis of Cooperative Election Study data.
That divide makes simply combining all ballots cast before Election Day into a single “early vote” category potentially misleading.
Democrats also appear to hold an enthusiasm advantage at this stage of the campaign, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.
The survey found that 48 percent of voters who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election described themselves as very enthusiastic about voting this November.
Among voters who backed Trump in 2024, 30 percent described themselves as very enthusiastic about participating.
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The Reuters/Ipsos survey included 4,506 American adults and carried a margin of error of approximately two percentage points, although expressions of enthusiasm do not necessarily translate directly into turnout.
Ohio offered another closely watched early snapshot after voting began Tuesday, with voters arriving before dawn at some polling locations.
Reuters reported that Democrats outnumbered Republicans and independents among first-day voters in Medina County despite Republicans holding a registration advantage there.
Ohio is home to one of this year’s most consequential Senate races, with Republican Sen. Jon Husted facing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, while several congressional contests could also affect control of the House.
Still, early GOP voter turnout is clearly increasing each election cycle, and that has to worry Democrats.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
