Early voting has begun in half of the country, and there may be warning signs for Republicans in areas they need to win if they have any shot of maintaining their House and Senate majorities.

Across 10 Senate battlegrounds, 53 percent of early and mail-in votes have been cast by registered Democrats, while only 34 have been cast by registered Republicans, according to data from NBC News. And in none of those 10 battlegrounds, which range from Kansas to Maine, have more votes been cast by Republicans than Democrats.

As of last Wednesday, the number of votes cast by Republicans was lower than it was at that point in the 2022 midterm cycle in 10 of 12 states that provide party-registration data for early-voting figures and had seen a significant number of ballots cast, according to Tom Bonier, a senior adviser to TargetSmart, a left-leaning elections research firm. While the same was true for Democrats in nine of those 12 states—a phenomenon that Bonier chalks up to waning use of mail voting—Democrats also led Republicans in the number of ballots cast in 10 states.

Given that polls show independent voters poised to break toward Democrats, a sizable drop-off in Republican voters would cause the bottom to fall out for the GOP.

“So far, the Early Vote data I’ve seen has been broadly consistent with what those likely voter polls are suggesting. Across the board, the people showing up to vote in person appear to be disproportionately Democratic,” Zachary Donnini, an election analyst with VoteHub, wrote in a post on X. “We first saw it in Virginia and Ohio, and now this week’s early voting in Georgia and North Carolina has been particularly concerning for Republicans. Mail ballot return rates in New Jersey and Arizona tell a similar story. Nearly every measure of enthusiasm I’ve seen, both in surveys and in early voting, currently favors Democrats.”

A deeper dive into the numbers shows the hole Republicans find themselves in.

In North Carolina, the Republican share of the early-voting electorate is down nine percentage points from the same point in 2022, according to The New York Times. And in Iowa—where Democrats are looking to pick up the state’s GOP-held open Senate seat—Democrats lead Republicans in votes already cast, 54% to 30%. That’s a big swing from the same point in 2022, when 48% of the early vote was Democratic and 39% was Republican.

Of course, early-voting data can be misleading. A voter’s party registration doesn’t necessarily mean the voter cast a ballot for that party, and extrapolating from the data includes a lot of guesswork.

However, Republicans in critical states are sounding alarm bells about the data.

“This is really a weird cycle,” Tanya Karabanovs, a volunteer with the Ohio Republican Party, told The New York Times of the struggle her party has faced in get-out-the-vote efforts. “There’s no way to feel confident about any of the races, honestly.”

In Michigan, a local Republican Party chair had to resign in September after he publicly warned about the difficulties his party faced getting their voters out to the polls amid Trump’s sinking popularity with the GOP base.

“The vibes on the ground are the worst I’ve seen in my life,” now-former Marquette County Republican Party Chair Jackson Karki, who posts on X under the handle @RedLionPolitics, wrote in mid-September. “No one wants to promote candidates, no one wants to knock doors, no one wants to do shit. Attendance for any right wing event is at all time lows anywhere I go. Thank you Donald Trump for ruining it for us… and handing the country over to socialism.”

Ultimately, the GOP’s turnout issues reflect what the polls have been telling us for months: Republican voters are growing disillusioned with President Donald Trump, angry over his war in Iran and his tariffs that have spiked gas prices and caused economic hardship across the country. Those voters are threatening to sit out this election or even vote for Democrats, an outcome that would cause a blue tsunami.

For example, a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday found that just 33% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president—the lowest rating this poll has clocked in either of Trump’s terms. The pollsters also found that the generic ballot—in which voters say what party they will vote for in their own congressional district—has Democrats leading Republicans by 13 points among those who say they are “certain to vote” or have already voted.

When it comes to the early vote, the worst thing for Republicans seems to be that it confirms that the polls may not be off—and may even be underestimating Democrats.

In any event, we will know the outcome in 15 days. All gas, no brakes.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos