About 24 million people have voted early or cast mail-in ballots ahead of the 2022 midterms, which are a week from Tuesday.
Across more than 40 states that have reported voting totals so far, about 10.1 million have voted in person and 13.7 million people have returned mail-in ballots,
according to the United States Election Project, run by the University of Florida.
“This is the make-or-break week for early voting,”
wrote University of Florida professor Michael McDonald on Twitter. “If the past is a guide, the volume should pick up as people who tend to be younger and do not hold as strong partisan attachments make their choices and decide to vote.”
Over the past weekend, early voting opened in New Jersey and New York, which has one critical election between incumbent Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul and GOP challenger Rep. Lee Zeldin (D-N.Y.). And last week, a number of states, including Texas, started early voting.
According to the project, California, Florida, and Texas are all leading the way with more than 3 million early votes being cast in each state.
In Georgia, the secretary of state’s office signaled that voters are continuing to “break records with 1,505,447 voters casting their ballot during Early Voting” as another 115,819 people showed up to the polls over the weekend,
according to a news release issued Monday.
An analytics company that provides data to Democrats indicated that the turnout for the 2022 election appears to be higher than it was in 2018.
The 2022 midterm “turnout is very high for a midterm so far, but it’s still difficult to say if we’ll beat the historic turnout we saw in 2018,” Catalist CEO Michael Frias said in a
statement to CNN. “Mail voting and early voting have become much more popular than they were in 2018, but we’ve also seen a lot of people going back to Election Day voting since 2020.”
Republicans are favored to win the House in upcoming elections, buoyed by frustration over the economy as well as advantages in the redistricting process that takes place every 10 years.
The outlook is murkier for the GOP in the Senate. Several races in key battleground states remain tight, which prompted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to declare the chances of his party winning a majority are just 50–50 earlier this year.
Last week, an NBC-backed poll
showed 71 percent of Americans believe the United States is heading in the wrong direction. The poll also found that 50 percent of Americans believe the economy will get worse, while only 20 percent said it’s on the right track.
