Surprising Turnout Rates in 2026 Midterms

Voter turnout in the midterm elections this week was sky-high: According to political scientist Michael McDonald, it was the second-highest turnout rate in a midterm year since 1914, exceeded only by the 2018 midterms.

But talking about total turnout obscures some important trends. For instance, while overall turnout was indeed very high, that wasn’t the case everywhere. Turnout was especially high in majority-minority counties that were subject to elevated protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act until 2013, known as preclearance requirements. In these counties, turnout was as much as 10 percentage points higher than in 2022 — an enormous increase, potentially due to anger over the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year in Louisiana v. Callais. While turnout in majority-minority counties in the rest of the country increased, too, it did not increase by as much as in the covered counties. We note that this figure is limited to counties that were finished or nearly finished counting their ballots by the Friday afternoon following the election.

But looking at county-level measures doesn’t give us a great view into which individual voters actually participated in the election. To understand the actual turnout by different racial groups, we need to look at states’ registered voter files, which include indicators of participation for every registered voter in the country.

In the coming months, we will know each voter in the country who cast a ballot this week. While most states take weeks or months to process these records and make them public, Georgia already released preliminary records that allow us to take a first look at turnout rates by race.

In the Peach State, Black turnout increased dramatically from the 2022 midterms; as the graph above shows, this was reflected at the county level in other states once covered by the preclearance requirements. White turnout in the state, however, actually went down relative to 2022.

These two trends together mean that the turnout gap between white and Black voters plummeted this year. In fact, it was at the lowest point of any midterm election in the past 20 years. It was even lower than in any presidential election year (when it tends to be lower) aside from when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

This was driven both by white voters sitting out this year and by Black voters newly turning out. Take, for instance, voters who participated in the 2024 presidential election. Over 29 percent of white voters who cast a ballot that year stayed home this week; the same was true of just 24 percent of Black voters.

By the same token, 93 percent of white voters who cast a ballot this week also voted in 2024. In other words, there weren’t all that many new white voters in Georgia in 2026, but only 87 percent of Black Georgians who voted this year cast a ballot two years ago.

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The Supreme Court has systematically dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination in voting. That means there are severely limited federal tools available to prevent or strike down racially discriminatory election laws in the country. Despite this retreat from fully enforcing the 15th Amendment, Black voters showed up in huge numbers. But such participation rates are hard to maintain. While the killing of the Voting Rights Act might not have had negative effects in Georgia this year, that doesn’t mean the law’s death won’t have negative impacts in the years to come.

In future months, we will dig into what precisely caused this reaction, but for now it’s certainly possible that the gutting of the Voting Rights Act was a factor. Congress should pay attention and once again commit itself to the cause of protecting minority voters’ Constitutional rights.