‘Republicans Need To Catch Up’: Early Voting Flashes Warning Signs In Senate Battlegrounds

Republicans are trailing Democrats in the early voting numbers in multiple key battleground states as voters head to the polls Tuesday, but election experts warn that those figures alone cannot predict the outcome.

Decision Desk HQ analyst Geoffrey Skelley wrote on Sunday that though Democrats are so far outperforming their early voting numbers in 2024, the numbers are still not conclusive for either side.

“[A]bsentee and early voting data is only part of the overall electoral puzzle,” Skelley wrote. “On Election Day proper, many millions more voters will cast their ballots, and a vote counts the same regardless of when it’s cast.”

More than 57.5 million ballots have been cast early or by mail. According to On Point Politics, registered Democrats account for approximately 40% of early ballots in states reporting party registration, compared with 33% for Republicans and 27% for unaffiliated or other voters. Registration identifies the voters’ party affiliation, not which candidates they supported.

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In the 25 states that published party identification for early ballots in 2024, the split was 38% registered Democrats, 36% registered Republicans, and 26% unaffiliated or other. Compared with those figures, this year’s breakdown shows the Democratic registration advantage rising from 2 percentage points to 7.

In five crucial midterm states, the early-voting registration margins have shifted toward Democrats, according to Skelley’s Sunday write-up. Florida has shifted 8 points toward Democrats (R+11 to R+3), North Carolina roughly 13 points (R+1 to D+13), Maine 10 points (D+14 to D+24), Iowa roughly 13 points (R+0.2 to D+13), and Kansas 17 points (R+18 to R+1).

Skelley also points out that, as striking as these numbers appear on the surface, a stronger Democrat showing in early voting could leave a more Republican electorate to cast ballots on Election Day.

In Iowa, history favors the GOP on that point. In the 2014 Senate race, Democrat Rep. Bruce Braley led Joni Ernst by about 24,000 early votes, only for Ernst to dominate the Election Day vote — crushing Braley at the end of the night by more than 118,000 votes. Iowa’s reported 2026 early vote tally shows Democrats trailing their 2022 registration advantage by 7.1 points (D+17.8 in 2022 versus D+10.7 in 2026). But that comparison alone cannot establish how much support either candidate needs from independents or Election Day voters.

“E-Day voters have been a more GOP-leaning group in the COVID and post-COVID era, but how much more Republican they prove to be in 2026 will be critical,” Skelley wrote. “Higher Democratic turnout could also be cannibalizing votes that might otherwise have been cast on Election Day, limiting potential gains for that party.”

States like Texas do not register voters by party, and though many Democrats have pointed to record-breaking midterm turnout in blue counties as a promising sign for James Talarico, that does not mean that he will defeat Republican nominee Ken Paxton. In 2018, Texas also broke its record for midterm voter turnout as Beto O’Rourke challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, and O’Rourke still lost by more than 225,000 votes that year.

One race where the early voting data has drawn attention is Kansas, where Democrats have sharply narrowed the Republican registration advantage among early voters. In 2024, Republicans accounted for 52% of early ballots compared to just 34% for Democrats. The registration lead has shrunk considerably, with Republicans accounting for approximately 43% and Democrats 42% as of October 30, according to Skelley. The outcome will depend in part on Republican turnout and how unaffiliated voters cast their ballots.

“Republicans need to catch up,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said, warning that Democrats are turning out at presidential-year levels.

In an October Substack article, RealClearPolitics Senior Elections Analyst Sean Trende argued that readers should not overinterpret early voting data, especially this year. “The bigger problem is that we don’t really know how these individual voters are casting ballots,” Trende said.

“Election results can be thought of as a sort of formula. You take a party’s share of the early vote and multiply it by the number of votes cast before Election Day, and then add the product of the party’s share of the Election Day vote and the number of votes cast on Election Day,” Trende explained. “This gives you the party’s overall vote total. So if you know these four quantities (number of early votes, number of Election Day votes, Party A’s share of early votes, Party A’s share of Election Day votes), you can figure out the election result.”

The problem, according to Trende, is that “early voting gives us only one of those quantities.”

“All we really know is the number of early votes at a given point in time. Now we can use demographics and past precinct results to estimate the voting patterns of individuals who have returned ballots or who are identified as having voted early, but these are estimates. Worse, we know relatively little about the composition of the Election Day electorate,” Trende wrote.

The main metric most analysts, including Trende, are watching Tuesday night is the share of Election Day votes when compared with early votes — a number we won’t know until later Tuesday night.

In 2022, early ballots were only 30% of Iowa’s total and 35% of Maine’s, compared to 41% and 45% in 2024, respectively. If Tuesday’s turnout pushes the early share back toward 2022 levels, Republicans could have more opportunity to make up ground, provided Election Day voters turn out and favor the GOP strongly enough.

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