How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Kaleigh just mentioned Indiana Democrat Frank Mrvan. In this Congress, Mrvan’s voting record has been more conservative than 74 percent of Democrats — but when a party’s tide goes out, it tends to strand the party’s more moderate members first. An irony of wave elections is that they often decimate a party’s more moderate ranks, leaving the party further to the left or right.

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.