ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Election Day for the 2026 midterms is mere days away, but many throughout the U.S. have already taken advantage of early voting.
Nearly 21 million Americans have already cast their ballots, according to a report from the University of Florida's Election Lab, which tracks voting by mail and in person. The report shows in Texas, early voting is up 74 percent compared with 2022 and in Kansas, the number of early voters has more than doubled, while Maine, North Carolina and Ohio also have seen increases of more than 30 percent in early in-person and mail voting compared with the same point in 2022.
Seward County Clerk Stacia Long reported that her staff has been busy with advanced voters with almost 1,100 ballots cast as of Wednesday afternoon.
Travis Trawick, CEO of FullPAC, a nonpartisan campaign technology provider, said the numbers have been interesting to watch this election cycle.
“What we do is help political organizations with their voter outreach. We help with engagement, we help with data collection, and we do that through a variety of different outreach methods,” Trawick said. “From the beginning of the campaigns, we get this information from the campaigns. They provide it from state voter rolls, different voter files, and we take that data and then throughout the course of a campaign, we are identifying supporters, identifying undecideds, running issue texts, and finding out how people are responding to the messaging. We are collecting data constantly on if they plan to vote, who they're going to vote for, which issues are most important, and other issues that really resonate with them and move the needle. We do all of that in addition to hundreds of other little individual data points which help build a profile on a voter so we can model them and understand their turnout percentage score, whether they're likely to vote and who they're likely to vote for, and then curating the messaging to all those people in all those different voter groups with you know personalized, individualized outreach.”
So far in Kansas, Trawick said the numbers have skyrocketed.
“This is the largest early voting we've had for a midterm election. It doesn't quite beat the 2024 presidential election, but it's still a great sign people are voting early,” Trawick said. “What we can do with that information is we get the list of people who have already participated in the election from the state board of elections. We can remove those people so they are no longer getting outreach and continue to optimize additional messaging to those people. For example, if you have a list of supporters you've identified, and only 30 percent of them have voted early, now you know it’s those final 70 percent you have to continue to contact and make sure you're reaching out to them and encouraging them to go vote in person on Election Day if their early voting is already closed.”
Trawick added the high early voter turnout is providing a lot of inspiration for candidates in terms of campaign messaging.
“It's definitely motivated the candidates on all sides of the line. It really depends on the type of voter it is, but we are seeing voters are more willing to participate early. They understand the accessibility of early voting and vote by mail is no longer some barrier to entry,” Trawick said. “You don't have to have an excuse – in most places, you can actually vote relatively easily. People now also understand voting is safe and it's a fair way to participate in democracy. We're all for encouraging early voting and making sure people can vote in a way that works best for them. And seeing the high turnout so far is great because it means outreach is working, it means voters are informed that there's an election and they know it's safe and easy to vote by mail or vote early, and that's something we are highly encouraging. Depending on which state you are, some states it opens a few months early, and in some states it's only a couple weeks. During that early voting period, we're messaging voters and supporters and making sure they know they can vote early, pushing them to the polls, and emphasizing that urgency about when that early voting deadline is closing, or else you're going to need to vote in person on Election Day, and then we’re switching that messaging to essentially ‘Here's where you vote, here's your polling location, here's how to vote, here's the polling hours,’ and all of that information.”
With early voting wrapping up soon, Trawick said he and his colleagues will be extremely busy.
“It's truly nonstop. We are supporting our candidate clients across the country with their outreach and acting as an extension of their team, providing services, scalable and outreach tools they need, and we help create those curated plans, outreach targeting, etc., for what the voters going to see, how they're going to be engaged, what the timing looks like, making sure that,” Trawick said. “The campaigns obviously signs off on all of that, but otherwise, we’re getting a lot of messaging and digital outreach set up for them, so it's nonstop. Our team works hundreds of hours collectively per week getting everything set up, and it's been nonstop really since the first week of October. But now, in these final seven days, it's truly been nonstop.”
