Early voting passes 13 million and runs far ahead of 2022 in the Senate battlegrounds, with Texas up 74 percent and Kansas more than doubled

The midterm election is not waiting for November 3. An Associated Press analysis of early voting through Tuesday counts more than 13 million ballots already cast nationwide, against about 9 million at the same point in the 2022 midterms, as of October 22. Part of the rise is mechanical. More states offer early voting or publish the data than did four years ago. Part of it is plainly energy.

The sharpest rises sit exactly where control of the Senate will be decided. Texas early vote is up 74 percent on 2022. Kansas has more than doubled. Maine, North Carolina and Ohio are each up more than 30 percent in combined early in person and mail voting. Democrats are trying to take Republican held Senate seats in all five states. Michigan and Georgia are running close to their 2022 pace, and Iowa is down about 6 percent.

North Carolina shows the shape of it. The Center for North Carolina Politics counts 1,101,318 ballots banked by October 22, up 302,540, or 38 percent, on the same day in 2022, and already halfway to the state full 2022 early total with ten days left. In person voting drives the rise, up 45 percent, while mail voting is down 31 percent. Registered Democrats are 62 percent ahead of their 2022 pace and unaffiliated voters are 72 percent ahead, while Republicans have just drawn level, 1.7 percent ahead of where they were.

That pattern repeats in the Associated Press figures. In most of the battleground states, Republicans make up a smaller share of the early electorate than they did four years ago. Republican strategists have an answer ready, that their voters have historically preferred Election Day and that some of the Democratic surge is voters moving their usual ballots earlier rather than new voters appearing. Both things can be true at once, and the honest limit of the data is this. Early voting measures who has voted. It does not count the votes, and it cannot say who wins.

What it does say, twelve days out, is that the opposition party electorate is unusually awake in a midterm the president party usually loses ground in, and that campaigns now have a smaller and smaller Election Day left in which to change the result. Most of this election is being decided early, in person, one polling place line at a time.