---
title: "Ohio’s Reddest Counties Just Erased Most of Their 2024 GOP Registration Edge"
description: "Early-vote data show a 30-point Republican lead in Trump’s strongest counties down to 5 points, with the Senate seat on the line"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-11T16:52:42.803Z
modified: 2026-10-12T07:04:46Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/ohio-s-reddest-counties-just-erased-most-of-their-2024-gop-r-f13c06
language: en
tags: ["politics", "elections", "democrats", "ohio", "turnout", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Ohio’s Reddest Counties Just Erased Most of Their 2024 GOP Registration Edge

*Early-vote data show a 30-point Republican lead in Trump’s strongest counties down to 5 points, with the Senate seat on the line*

By Luis Goa · October 11, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/ohio-s-reddest-counties-just-erased-most-of-their-2024-gop-r-f13c06

## In brief

- GOP’s early-voter lead in Ohio’s reddest counties fell from 30 points in 2024 to 5 points in 2026
- Ohio’s full pre-election electorate is 27 points more Democratic than at the same point in 2024
- Harris counties in Ohio and Virginia are voting about 7 points faster than Trump counties, Catalist data show
- CNN poll: Brown leads Husted 49%-43%; Acton leads Ramaswamy by 8 points in Ohio’s governor race
- Pew: Democratic voters are 17 points more likely to call themselves ‘extremely motivated,’ 63% vs 46%

In the three Ohio counties Donald Trump carried by 20 points or more in 2024, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats among early voters by 30 percentage points at this point in that cycle. Four years later, in the same counties, the gap is 5 points. That 25-point swing, reported by [Ethan Cohen for CNN](https://cnn.com/2026/10/11/politics/early-voting-midterms-ohio-democratic-shift-vis), is the clearest single number in the state’s new early-voting data, and it needs a definition before it means much, because Ohio does not register voters by party.

The state infers affiliation from primary history: a voter counts as Republican or Democratic based on whichever party’s ballot they last pulled. County boards must report daily totals to the Secretary of State’s office under [state election law](https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/voters/ohio-absentee-data/), through a dashboard that has run since the November 2024 general election. Statewide, the pre-election electorate so far is 27 points more Democratic than at the same point in 2024, a bigger shift than the county numbers alone suggest because it folds in turnout along with affiliation. The caveat is the sample: Ohio has banked only about 11% of the total early-vote turnout it saw in 2022, so the figures can still move, and already have. A later batch of county data, covering the Friday after the 30-to-5 figure was measured, ran slightly more Republican than Thursday’s. Affiliation is also not a vote: a voter who last pulled a Democratic primary ballot is free to vote for Jon Husted in November, and Republicans have historically voted early in person and on Election Day at higher rates than Democrats, who lean more on mail ballots.

![A crumbling stack of red envelopes stands beside an intact blue stack, with an eraser, scattered fragments, and cream envelopes on a yellow background.](https://rews.cc/img/bd7d4f87c559dcc4085f76e26ddf68daf20325dd.webp)

Affiliation aside, the pace of voting splits by partisanship too. Counties that gave Kamala Harris more than 20 points in 2024 have banked 74% of their full 2024 early-vote total already; counties that gave Trump 20-plus points are at 67%. That 7-point gap matches Virginia, where Harris counties are running at 78% of 2024’s pace against 61% for Trump counties, according to Catalist, a data and analytics firm whose clients are mostly Democratic campaigns, academics and nonprofit advocacy groups. The client list doesn’t invalidate the count, which is pulled from public voter files, but it’s worth naming given the numbers happen to favor the firm’s usual customers.

Ohio’s numbers also confirm a trend that began after the pandemic: voters drifting back to in-person ballots. In-person early voting in the state is running at 72% of its 2024 pace; mail voting is at just 25%. New Jersey, which does register voters by party and so avoids Ohio’s primary-history proxy, shows a similar partisan drift: in the three counties Trump won by 20 points or more, the Democratic share of returned ballots is up almost 11 points from this point in 2024. In-person early voting hasn’t started there yet, so part of that shift could just be Republicans continuing to abandon mail ballots rather than any change in who eventually shows up.

![A vintage collage shows a person holding a ballot walking toward a blue-curtained voting booth, beside an open mailbox and an envelope on a yellow background.](https://rews.cc/img/dd85a108b841ace5d371471647eac79462b7e478.webp)

The pattern recurs outside Ohio and New Jersey, in ballot-request data [CNN compiled](https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/01/politics/cnn-early-voting-takeaways-democratic-advantage) from state election offices. Democrats’ share of requested ballots is up from 2024 in Iowa (54% to 67%), Pennsylvania (62% to 66%), Maine (53% to 57%) and North Carolina (36% to 42%). The catch: in three of those four states, the 2024 Democratic share was itself a comedown from 2022, so the current numbers mostly describe a partial rebound rather than a new high. Iowa is the exception — its 67% this year beats both prior midterm cycles in the comparison.

Ohio’s numbers matter because the seat is one of [roughly ten Senate races](https://rews.cc/a/the-senate-map-now-runs-10-deep-including-a-kansas-seat-last-967cba) now rated competitive, and because it’s a special election: Husted was appointed to the seat Vice President JD Vance vacated, so voters get to ratify or reverse that appointment directly. A [CNN poll](https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/08/politics/cnn-polls-ohio-iowa-senate-governor-midterms) conducted Sept. 29–Oct. 5 among 760 registered Ohio voters, with a 4.5-point margin of error, found Brown leading Husted 49% to 43% among likely voters. In the governor’s race on the same ballot, Democrat Amy Acton led Republican Vivek Ramaswamy by 8 points. The same poll put Trump’s approval rating in Ohio at 36%, against 64% disapproval — worse than even the [27% national approval](https://rews.cc/a/latino-voters-back-democrats-by-24-points-as-trump-approval--8a9006) a different poll found him at the same week, though the two surveys used different samples and methods and aren’t directly comparable. Trump has been [stumping in Ohio](https://rews.cc/a/trump-told-ohio-it-wants-data-centers-the-polls-say-ohio-dis-f74684) for a federal push on data centers in the state; Ohio polling on that specific issue has run against him too.

![An antique wooden armchair with cracked red leather upholstery stands on a torn black-and-white city photograph, with blue paper underneath on a beige background.](https://rews.cc/img/3753e682a5dfd2b3b814a44a894c531142b3c5b1.webp)

None of this is a count of votes, only of who has requested or returned a ballot so far. The same [Pew Research survey](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/10/08/with-americans-in-a-sour-mood-democratic-voters-are-more-engaged-in-midterms/) that found a national enthusiasm gap — supporters of Democratic candidates are 17 points more likely than Republican supporters to call themselves “extremely motivated” to vote, 63% to 46% — also found Democratic candidates leading the generic House ballot 44% to 36% among registered voters. Early-voting samples, though, skew older and less Republican than the electorate that eventually turns out, a limitation CNN’s own analysts flagged in both the Ohio and multistate numbers. Republicans in recent cycles have voted disproportionately in person and on Election Day itself, a pattern that could still close the gap by Nov. 3.

Ohio’s dashboard updates daily through Nov. 2, the day before the election decides whether Brown returns to the Senate seat he lost in 2024 or Husted keeps the appointment he got when Vance moved to the vice presidency. The one county batch of data available for the Friday after the 30-to-5 figure was measured already ran slightly more Republican than Thursday’s. Whether that’s noise or the start of Election Day’s usual pattern reasserting itself is the number to watch between now and polls closing.

## See also

- [2026 United States Senate special election in Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_special_election_in_Ohio) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the Husted-Brown contest and how the seat became vacant
- [Early vote analysis: mail-ballot concerns are changing how Democrats vote](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/early-vote-analysis-mail-ballot-concerns-are-changing-democrats-vote-rcna602489) — nbcnews.com · NBC's deeper look at the shift away from mail voting
- [Hottest 2026 midterm races tracker](https://forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/10/08/hottest-2026-midterm-races-republican-hinson-leads-in-iowa-senate-contest-democrat-brown-ahead-in-ohio-updated-daily) — forbes.com · Forbes' daily-updated polling tracker across key 2026 races
- [Ohio Secretary of State election results and data portal](https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/election-results-and-data/) — ohiosos.gov · The state's raw election-data hub behind the daily dashboard