US midterms 2026: over 43 million early votes cast, Texas already 1.75 million past 2022

More than 43 million Americans have already voted in the 2026 US midterm elections, with less than a week to go until polling day on Tuesday 3 November, the BBC reported, citing the University of Florida Election Lab. The elections decide which party controls Congress for the last two years of Donald Trump's presidency.

The early vote in numbers

• Four to five million early ballots are being cast each day, far faster than in most previous elections, according to the Election Lab run by Professor Mike McDonald.
• Texas has already gone about 1.75 million votes past its 2022 total, with more than 5.8 million ballots cast. It has become a key battleground that could decide who controls the Senate.
• In the roughly half of states where voters register a party, 44% of early ballots came from registered Democrats, 31.2% from Republicans and 24.7% from voters with no party. Republican early voting is broadly level with 2022, while Democratic and unaffiliated voting is up.
• In North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, the three states that record race at registration, voting is up among Hispanic and Black voters and level among white voters. Some Texas border counties that are more than 90% Hispanic look set to beat their 2022 turnout in early voting alone.

Overall turnout appears on track to beat recent elections, McDonald said, and could even approach 2018, which set the record for a midterm.

A note of caution: party registration shows who voted, not whom they voted for. Unaffiliated voters, a quarter of the early vote in those states, can go either way.

Why it is being watched from Pakistan

The result will shape how much room Trump has in his last two years on trade, aid and the Middle East, including the Iran confrontation, which has kept oil markets on edge this month and that matters directly for petrol prices in Pakistan.

When results arrive in Pakistan time

Polls close on the evening of Tuesday 3 November across six US time zones. With US clocks back on standard time from 1 November, 7pm on the US east coast is 5am on Wednesday 4 November in Pakistan, so the first results come in on Wednesday morning PKT and the tallies run through the Pakistani working day. Close races, especially in states that count postal ballots late, can take days.

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