How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Meanwhile, in North Carolina’s Senate race, Democrat Cheri Beasley currently leads Republican Ted Budd 58 percent to 41 percent (with about 36 percent of the expected vote in). Of course, it’s still early, so we won’t get too ahead of ourselves here. Plus, for Democrats, North Carolina has recently been more of a white whale than a bird in hand: In fact, no Democrat has won a statewide federal race there since 2008.

Time to dive into some county results! In Fulton County, Georgia (home of Atlanta, mostly), 63 percent of the expected vote is reporting, and Warnock leads Walker 75 percent to 25 percent. In the 2021 runoff that Warnock won, he carried Fulton 73 percent to 27 percent, so that’s a positive sign for him.

Well, I think as you noted, Alex, these are mostly early and absentee ballots so far showing Hines trailing, which mostly tells us that Hines supporters are most likely to vote in-person. A distrust of absentee voting, partly fueled by Trump’s inaccurate claims of fraud, has likely influenced that trend. But if we were to see an upset, I’m not sure it would tell us much about election deniers specifically. We’ve seen other election deniers lose GOP primaries earlier this year. Simply going along with Trump’s election denialism isn’t enough to win over voters on its own. Typically, it’s more of a signal of the type of candidate — Trumpy, conservative, MAGA — than a single issue that sways voters. Instead, if Hines isn’t able to win tonight, I think that would say more about how we might expect Republicans overall to perform.