In Ohio, every source agrees on the margin and disagrees on independents

Ohio’s Secretary of State publishes a free file of every absentee and early ballot, with each voter’s party taken from the last partisan primary they voted in. As of Oct 22, 2026, it listed 838,018 returned ballots: 33.3% from voters whose last primary was Democratic, 27.4% Republican and 39.4% with no partisan primary. That is D+5.9. The NBC News / TargetSmart tracker, counting the same ballots, says D 49, R 43, Other 8: D+6.

What it means

The state file and the tracker agree on the margin almost exactly, from very different methods. One reads a field in the state’s records; the other is TargetSmart’s model. VoteHub’s primary-history measure is close too, at D+6.6.

On a two-party basis the sources sit in a narrow band. The state file gives Democrats 54.9% of the two-party early vote. The tracker gives 53.3%, L2’s public dashboard 55.7%, On Point 56.0% and VoteHub 56.3%.

The Ohio early vote leans Democratic on every source we found. The agreement on the margin is not new: at a similar point in 2024, 13 days out, the 2024 state file with party as of 2024 gave R+10.0 and the tracker gave R+8.

What it doesn’t mean

The sources do not agree on independents. In the state file, 39.4% of early voters have no partisan primary on record. The tracker has 8% Other. Those numbers measure different things. The state’s Other is everyone who skipped recent primaries, including many habitual partisans. The tracker’s 49–43 is a modelled partisanship score that puts most of them into a party.

“Every source” has limits. L2 and On Point put the margin at D+10 and D+9, three to four points more Democratic than the state file. Their methods are partly opaque, and both assign party to most voters.

The primary record has its own tilt. The May 2026 primary drew mainly committed Democrats and Republicans, and a contested primary on one side can inflate that side for a cycle. In North Carolina, where we could test the method, it got the margin within a point but understated the unaffiliated share by 10 points.

Party is not vote choice. Neither a primary ballot nor a modelled score says how anyone will vote on Nov 3.

How we checked

We read the Secretary of State’s export as of 11:00 ET on Oct 22, 2026: 1,197,163 requests for the Nov 3 general, with no duplicate voter IDs. A ballot counts as returned when it has a return date. The file contains names and addresses, so it was reduced to counts by county, party and status in the browser and never saved.

Returned ballots split 348,877 by mail and 489,141 in person, using the same-day rule UF Election Lab uses. By mode, mail voters were 28.0% D, 22.5% R and 49.5% Other; in-person voters 37.0% D, 30.9% R and 32.2% Other. Only 1,452 returned ballots came from Libertarian primary voters.

The 358,145 requested ballots not yet returned are 16.8% D, 17.2% R and 66.4% Other.

Our total matches UF Election Lab’s exactly, and NBC’s is 557 higher. We have not refreshed the state file since Oct 22. By Oct 23, UF counted 922,179 Ohio early ballots, and the tracker’s split was unchanged at D 49, R 43, Other 8.