More than 2 million people have already cast their ballots to decide November races, marking a higher-than-normal turnout for early voting during a midterm election cycle and putting it on par with the record turnout recorded in 2018.
Exactly 2,030,730 people have already voted in more than a dozen states that have opened early voting options, according to data analyzed by the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project. Of those, 1,842,155 people voted through mail-in ballots, while 188,615 cast their votes in person.
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“It’s clear that we are above the 2018 midterm at the same point in time in states where we have comparable data to look at,” Michael McDonald, professor at the University of Florida, told ABC News. “We can see the sorts of indicators that would suggest that we’re in for a high-turnout election, much like we had in 2018. And 2018 was the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914.”
Nearly one-third of all early votes recorded so far have been cast in Florida, which has recorded the highest number of early voting.
The numbers recorded so far are higher than typical early turnout for midterm elections, marking a recent trend over the last several years that shows voters shifting from voting in person on Election Day to casting their ballots well in advance.
From 2006 to 2018, in-person voting on Election Day decreased from 80% to 60%, according to voter data. Over the same time period, early in-person voting increased from 5.8% to 16.7%, and early mail-in voting increased from 13.8% to 22.3%.
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“What we’re observing here is that some people have changed their behavior. They’re either voting early, where they may not have done so in a past midterm election, or they’re voting sooner than they would have,” McDonald said. “Those are both things that we saw in 2020, where people were not only voting by mail, and in person early at greater frequencies than they had past elections, but they were also voting earlier than they had in prior presidential elections.”
Democrats have outnumbered Republicans voting early in this midterm cycle, 52.3% to 31.1%, according to the data.
