How Election Week 2022 Went Down

We already have nearly 2 million votes counted in Florida — that state counts fast! — and Rubio and Demings are effectively tied, with Rubio taking a slight lead. That’s good news for the Republican, as those are all early votes and mail-in ballots, which tend to skew toward Democrats.

Chad, Gallup’s recent polling has found around 30 percent of Americans identify as Democrats and around 30 percent identify as Republicans, with the remainder identifying with neither. So that does make it look like a ton of people are independent. But most of those independents actually lean toward one party — so many, in fact, that really only around a 10th of the public doesn’t prefer one party to some extent. And neither party has a major edge after you account for those leaners. Then you add in increasing polarization — the parties and their voters moving farther away from each other — and negative partisanship — the increasing antipathy voters have toward the opposition — and you end up with two fairly concrete groups who don’t break much with their party. As a result, that small group of swing voters in the middle hold a lot of power, even though they tend to be less engaged and more likely to view both parties negatively.

Over at The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey wrote an article about America’s penchant for tight elections with the perhaps too-provocative headline “Why Is America Always Divided 50-50?” Am I right to think that it’s not that simple? Judging by voter registration, is it really something like 35-35 with a bunch of people in the middle who happen to be splitting pretty evenly these days?