Cuyahoga County voters showed up at the polls at the highest rate in at least the last seven midterm elections.
Unofficial results from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections put this year’s general election turnout at almost 54.9%.
That’s the county’s strongest midterm turnout percentage going back at least to 1998, the earliest consecutive midterm for which turnout numbers were readily available. The figure will grow as provisional ballots are verified and added to the count.
The numbers show that Cuyahoga County still has political weight to throw around, even though the county’s population is stagnant while other parts of Ohio grow.
Before everyone starts talking about the next election — the 2028 race for the White House — here are some observations about what last night’s turnout tells us about the Cleveland area.
Trump turns up Cuyahoga turnout
In at least the last 28 years of midterm elections, heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County has crossed the 50% turnout mark only twice: this year and in 2018. Both are midterms under President Donald Trump in which the Republican Party lost its hold on the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats also scored key statewide victories in both of those elections. In 2018, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown held on to office despite Ohio’s turn to Trump two years earlier. This year, Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton won, along with other down-ticket Democrats.
This time around, voters beat Cuyahoga County’s 2018 turnout rate — 54.5% — by a hair. But 2018 still holds the title for most ballots cast in a recent midterm.
Eight years ago, voters cast 492,324 ballots in Cuyahoga County. This year, the number of ballots cast stands at 482,011.
But there are still 11,781 outstanding provisional and overseas ballots, meaning 2026 still has a chance to overtake 2018. The board of elections will process those ballots and add them to the official count in the coming weeks.
The recent midterm with the third-highest Cuyahoga County vote total was 2006, another Democratic wave year under a Republican president.
Early-in-person voting surged
Far more people voted in person before Election Day this fall than in prior midterms. More than 54,000 voters cast ballots early at the board of elections. That’s more than double the 19,000 to 20,000 people who voted early in person in the prior two midterms.
Perhaps many voters preferred not to leave their ballots in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service this year. Vote-by-mail numbers dropped in 2026, too. More than 108,000 people returned mail-in ballots this year, down from roughly 157,000 in 2018.
Cuyahoga County suburbs lead the turnout race
A common voting trend persisted in this election, too: Turnout tended to be higher in the suburbs than in Cleveland proper.
Bay Village, Brecksville and Independence were among the suburbs with more than 70% turnout. Cleveland Wards 5 and 14 notched the lowest turnout, around 27%.
But Cleveland’s 39.7% turnout was an 8.8-point improvement over its 30.9% turnout four years ago. (Countywide, turnout went up by about 7.5 percentage points since 2022.) In 2018, 40% of Cleveland registered voters cast ballots.
And as the county’s biggest city, Cleveland is still a major source of votes. One out of every five Cuyahoga County ballots came from Cleveland.
Cuyahoga eclipsed by Franklin County
Franklin County, home to Columbus, is racking up more votes — and has more registered voters — than Cuyahoga these days. Franklin’s turnout was 56%, roughly the same as Cuyahoga’s.
More than 511,000 voters cast ballots in Franklin County this fall, compared to 482,000 here in Cuyahoga. It’s not a new development. The Central Ohio metropolis’s voting totals overtook Cuyahoga’s between 2018 and 2020.
That means the geography of Ohio Democratic power is shifting, too. About 15% of Acton’s votes came from Franklin County. Twenty years ago, Franklin produced 9.9% of Ted Strickland’s votes in his gubernatorial win. (Cuyahoga County was 13.8% of Strickland’s coalition and 14.3% of Acton’s.)
The growing Columbus area has become a bigger part of a winning Democratic coalition. What happens to Cleveland’s importance as Cuyahoga County’s population remains flat?
As Ohio’s second-largest county, Cuyahoga still packs an electoral punch. But a couple of hours south on I-71, another county is starting to hit harder.
