More than 35 million ballots have already been cast in the 2026 midterms as of October 28. In the states that publish age breakdowns, the pattern is the same one that has defined midterm elections for decades. Voters age 65 and older make up half or more of the early ballots in most places. Voters under 30 make up a small fraction. The noise coming from college campuses and social media does not yet match the people walking into early-voting sites or returning mail ballots.
Who Is Showing Up
In Michigan, 60.5 percent of the early and absentee ballots through October 27 came from voters 65 and older. Voters 18 to 29 accounted for 5.5 percent. In Florida the senior share was 56.9 percent and the 18-to-24 share was 2.8 percent. Ohio showed 56.5 percent seniors and 3.5 percent ages 18 to 24. California reported 52.9 percent seniors and 4.0 percent ages 18 to 24. Georgia was somewhat younger, with 41.4 percent seniors and 5.2 percent ages 18 to 24, but still far from a youth-dominated electorate. Across the states that release age data covering more than 6.9 million early voters, people over 65 accounted for 50.4 percent of the ballots while those 18 to 25 accounted for 4.5 percent.
These figures are not a surprise. Midterm electorates have long been older than presidential electorates. Young adults register and vote at higher rates when a presidential race is on the ballot. In midterms they stay home in larger numbers. The current early-vote numbers simply confirm that the usual gap has not closed this year.
Registration Is Up. Voting Is Not.
Youth registration is modestly higher than it was at the same point before the 2022 midterms. Among 18- to 19-year-olds the increase is larger. That is a real change in the pool of potential voters. It has not yet translated into a larger share of the ballots already cast. The people who have voted early so far are disproportionately the same reliable, older voters who dominate midterms every cycle. Frequent voters—those who cast ballots in six or more of the last eight elections—make up the bulk of the early total in the states that track the figure.
Party registration among early voters favors Democrats in many of the states that publish the data. That advantage is typical of early and mail voting and does not by itself predict the final result. Older voters as a group lean more Republican and more supportive of the current administration than younger voters do. The early electorate is therefore both more Democratic in registration and more conservative in age composition than the overall adult population.
What the Pattern Suggests
Early voting does not decide elections. It does show who is motivated enough to act before Election Day. Right now that group is heavily weighted toward people who have voted in previous midterms and who are past retirement age. The campus protests, the socialist organizing, and the anti-Israel and anti-war activity are visible. They have not produced a corresponding surge in ballots from the age groups most associated with those views. If the final electorate looks like the early electorate, the preferences of older voters will carry more weight than the volume of online commentary from younger ones. That has been the case in most recent midterms. Nothing in the numbers so far indicates that 2026 will be the exception.
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