More than 43 million Americans have already voted with less than a week to go before the midterm elections on November 3, according to BBC News, a pace that the University of Florida Election Lab says is well above most previous elections. The contests will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.

The daily rate is the striking part. Four to five million early votes have been cast each day, Professor Mike McDonald, who runs the Election Lab database, told the BBC. Overall turnout appears on track to outpace 2020 and possibly 2018, the midterm that beat the 1914 record for total turnout.

Texas is setting the pace. The state has already surpassed its 2022 early-vote numbers by about 1.75 million voters, with more than 5.8 million ballots cast, McDonald said. It has also seen the highest above-average turnout rate so far, and it has emerged as a key battleground that could decide which party controls the Senate for the rest of Donald Trump's presidency.

Party registration data points in one direction, with a large caveat. In the roughly half of states that require voters to register a political affiliation, Thursday's figures showed 44% of early ballots cast by Democrats, 31.2% by Republicans and 24.7% by voters with no affiliation. Democratic early voting is up, Republican early voting is broadly similar to 2022, and unaffiliated voting is higher, McDonald said. The data does not show which candidates those voters chose.

Three states require voters to give their race when they register: North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. In those states, early voting is up among Hispanic and Black communities while white turnout is roughly on par with 2022. "That makes sense because communities of colour are more frequently part of the Democratic coalition, and whites are more frequently part of the Republican coalition," McDonald said. Texas does not collect party or race data, but border counties that are more than 90% Hispanic are seeing a surge, and some will beat their 2022 turnout in the early vote alone.

The Senate map has widened at the same time. NPR reports that Democrats were seen as longshots when the cycle began, because so many seats up for election are in red states, but that the field has expanded as the war in Iran has continued. Polling, advertising money and candidate travel now point to competitive races in places Trump won by double digits in 2024. The Cook Political Report rates Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas as toss-ups.

"I'm very energized," Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told NPR. "We have so many candidates running in so many deep red and purple places, and they are winning." The National Republican Senatorial Committee's national press secretary, Bernadette Breslin, countered that "Senate Democrats' socialist surge has reached a fever pitch," pointing to a controversy in Alaska over an alleged effort by people connected to Democrat Mary Peltola's campaign to recruit Daniel J. Sullivan to run against the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan. The New York Times first reported that story.

The map has shifted in both directions. North Carolina, which Trump won narrowly and which was seen as a toss-up at the start of the cycle, is now rated a likely Democratic flip by Cook, according to NPR. Georgia, once a top Republican target, is now seen as a likely Democratic hold. Those ratings are forecasts, not results, and the early-vote numbers do not by themselves settle them.

What the early vote can and cannot show is worth keeping straight. Higher turnout usually helps Democrats in recent cycles, but the party-registration figures cover only about half the states, and they record affiliation rather than votes cast for a candidate. Early ballots can also be rejected, and the shift toward in-person early voting, which McDonald attributes partly to concerns about postal voting, changes how those ballots are counted and challenged.

The mechanics have changed since the pandemic. More states began offering early voting in 2020, when more than two-thirds of ballots were cast before Election Day and half of those by mail. Voters now return ballots earlier and increasingly vote early in person, McDonald said. Minneapolis said on Thursday that it had set an early-voting record for a non-presidential year, one of several local records reported as the deadline approaches.

For readers following the national picture, the useful comparison is with how other governments publish their numbers. The Fed's survey of US household finances and UK business investment data show the kind of granular releases that make claims checkable; US election administration is more fragmented, with county-level data arriving at different speeds. The political mood is also being read through other signals, including the final stretch of the campaign season and the candidates' travel schedules.

The limits are real. The turnout figures come from one academic database and a single BBC report; the Senate ratings come from Cook and NPR's reporting; and no exit polling exists yet. Early-vote composition can shift in the final days, and the party-affiliation numbers are not a projection. What is clear is the scale: more than 43 million ballots have already been cast, and both parties are behaving as if the Senate is in play.