For Democrats, there are already plenty of signs pointing to a good election night this November. There's the record number of House candidates outraising their Republican incumbent rivals. There's the unlikely rise of Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke giving Ted Cruz a real run for his seat. There are the upset victories in state legislature races, like the one in Virginia last fall. And of course, there are polls showing Democrats with a steady lead over Republicans on a generic ballot.

But NGP VAN, which has maintained the Democratic voter file since 2004 and builds many of the party's voter outreach tools, is trumpeting a different data point: the record number of people using MiniVAN, its mobile canvassing app.

MiniVAN is what Democratic volunteers use when they knock on your door. Instead of lugging around a clipboard and stack of papers, they can log their results in the app, which also tells them what houses to hit. The app launched on iOS in 2010 and Android in 2011. Earlier this month, one user noticed that MiniVAN was trending in the iPhone app store and tweeted it out.

Already this year, 218,189 people have logged onto the app. That's far more than the 153,513 who logged on during all of 2016, and there are still more than six weeks to go before Election Day.

Amanda Coulombe, NGP VAN's general manager for organizing, decided to dig into the numbers and found some eye-popping results. Already this year, 218,189 people have logged onto the app. That's far more than the 153,513 who logged on during all of 2016, and there are still more than six weeks to go before Election Day. MiniVAN set a new single-day record on Saturday, September 15, with 18,421 people logging on across the country. The previous record---16,496 users in a single day---was set on November 5, 2016, the last Saturday before the presidential election when campaigns typically do their biggest push.

The gap was even bigger when Coulombe's team compared that September weekend in 2018 to the same one in 2016. In 2018, 28,216 people logged onto the app over the course of that weekend. That same weekend in 2016, in the heat of one of the most vicious presidential cycles in recent history, just 8,367 did. That's a more than 237 percent increase this year. Meanwhile, more than 39,000 people used the app in the first half of September this year, roughly twice the number of people who used it in all of September 2016.

Part of that spike has to do with increased adoption of the app; 60 percent of volunteers are using MiniVAN over pen and paper this year, a slightly larger share than past years when about half of canvassers used the app. But that doesn't account for such a dramatic lift. "Overall, we’re seeing increases from 2016 across the board," says Coulombe, who led get out the vote efforts for senator Elizabeth Warren's 2012 campaign. That includes increases in the overall number of voter contacts people are recording on the app.

It might seem logical that more people would use an app with each passing year, given that mobile penetration has steadily grown in the United States every year. And yet, NGP VAN found that despite increases in smartphone ownership between 2012 and 2014, there were still more MiniVAN users during the 2012 presidential election than there were during the midterms two years later.

Given how much higher turnout typically is in a presidential election year than in a midterm year, the 2018 numbers are staggering. While presidential elections have turned out 55 to 62 percent of the eligible voting population since 2000, the highest turnout in a midterm during that time was just under 42 percent of eligible voters. And that was in 2010, when Republicans dominated Democrats to win back the House.