Record 47.9 million Americans have voted early in US midterms
- Early voting for next week's US midterm elections has passed the 2022 record, with 47.9 million ballots cast.
- Turnout is up sharply in battleground states with close Senate races, including Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.
- Democrats make up a larger share of early voters, but analysts say that does not predict the result.
More Americans have voted before Election Day in next week's midterm elections than in any previous midterm, figures from the University of Florida's Election Lab showed on Friday.
The lab counted 47,922,669 early ballots nationwide by midday, above the 45.9 million cast ahead of Election Day in 2022.
The midterms will decide control of the Senate, where several races are fiercely contested, in the final two years of President Donald Trump's presidency.
Where the numbers are climbing
Texas had more than six million early voters by Wednesday, official figures showed, with in-person voting about 50 percent ahead of the same point in 2022.
North Carolina's election board said early voting was up nearly 37 percent on four years ago. South Carolina passed its entire 2022 early total on Monday, with five more days of early voting to go.
In Kansas, where Republican Senator Roger Marshall is fighting to keep his seat, advance ballots were about two-thirds higher than in 2022 last week, according to the secretary of state's office.
Georgia broke its own midterm record for early in-person voting on Thursday. Women made up 56 percent of ballots cast by then, against 44 percent for men.
"Georgians continue to head to the polls in record numbers because they trust the system," the state's top elections official, Brad Raffensperger, said on Thursday.
In states that record party affiliation, registered Democrats account for about 44 percent of early voters, Republicans 31 percent and unaffiliated or minor-party voters 25 percent, the Election Lab found.
Michael McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist who runs the lab, has pointed to stronger participation by Black and Hispanic voters in states that report racial data. Turnout has been particularly high in heavily Hispanic communities along the Texas-Mexico border.
Why it may not predict the winner
Analysts caution that early numbers do not forecast the outcome. A voter's party registration says nothing about which candidates they backed, and tens of millions more people are expected to vote on Tuesday.
Republicans have tended in recent elections to turn out in larger numbers on Election Day itself, which could shrink or wipe out the Democrats' early lead.
And voting early does not always mean more people vote overall. Some are simply casting ballots sooner than they would have in past years.
