VOTEWIRE ANALYSIS
More than 51 million ballots are already in, the president's approval has hit a historic pre-midterm low, and the courts have now rejected two of the administration's election lawsuits. The closing argument is written. What remains is who shows up on Tuesday.
Start with the number that dwarfs every poll: 51.31 million. That is how many Americans had already voted by Saturday afternoon, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab — more than the entire early vote of the 2022 midterm cycle. Texas alone has passed 7 million early votes, about 1.5 million more than its whole 2022 early total. In Harris County, 862,700 people had voted by Wednesday, against 564,500 at the same point in 2022.
Read that number honestly. An early-vote record does not, by itself, declare a winner: millions of people who once voted on Election Day now simply vote sooner, and party registration among early voters — 10.7 million Democrats to 7.8 million Republicans in the states that report it — says nothing about how any individual marked a ballot. What the number does prove is engagement on a scale no midterm has seen before. Working people are not waiting for permission to participate. They have already made their choices, in record numbers.
Fifty-one million ballots are the answer to every claim that voters have checked out. They have not. They are already in the count.
The second story of the final weekend is what did not happen in court. A federal judge has dismissed the administration's Alaska lawsuit, which sought to block certification of the Senate race if incumbent Dan Sullivan lost on a ballot that also carried a retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. That follows the appeals court's 2-1 ruling against the Justice Department's emergency bid to force California to set aside mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it alleges are likely noncitizens. The department's acting deputy attorney general has said the Supreme Court is "probably" next — but two courts have now refused to rewrite the rules days before the vote.
That matters beyond those two states: the pattern of the final week has been pressure aimed at the counting itself. When courts hold, the pressure moves to the next filing, the next claim, the next attempt to cast doubt on a result before it exists. The defense of the vote is not a single ruling — it is every ruling, plus the local election workers who open the polls on Tuesday and count what comes in, under rules the courts have twice declined to change midstream.
Then there is Michigan, where the closing weekend produced the campaign's strangest twist — and its clearest lesson about power. Representative Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, threw her support behind his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. Designed to fracture a coalition in the final days, it united one instead: Democratic leaders closed ranks behind El-Sayed, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling the move a betrayal and saying Senate Democrats are united behind El-Sayed because he will fight for Michigan working families.
Behind all of it sits the number the White House cannot spin away. President Trump's approval rating is 36 percent, with 61 percent disapproving, according to the New York Times poll tracker — the lowest favorability for any president heading into a midterm in 80 years, lower than Harry Truman's before the 1946 elections. The president closes his campaign Monday afternoon at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, after weekend rallies in Iowa and Kansas. But a closing speech does not undo a record written in grocery aisles and premium notices long before the final rallies.
So here is where the country stands, one day out. All 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, and 36 governorships are on the ballot, and with them the question of who holds power for the final two years of this presidency: a Congress that can check it, investigate it, and block its agenda, or majorities that keep clearing its path. Democrats need a net gain of four Senate seats for a majority. The early vote, the courts, and the polls all point the same way. None of that is a result.
What finishes it is Tuesday. If you have a mail ballot still at home, return it in person rather than trusting the mail at this point. If you have not voted, make the plan tonight: your polling place, your ride, your time around a shift. The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. Fifty-one million people have already spoken. Tomorrow, the rest of the country gets its turn — and the verdict they deliver will decide who holds power, and for whom they use it.