As Election Day neared, there was not a lot of discussion about Edward Durr, a Republican running for state senate in New Jersey. In September and October, there were eight tweets from five people mentioning Durr, excluding Durr himself. He was a long shot who spent about $150 on his campaign, running against the Democrat who served as state senate president. By all appearances, he was the sort of sacrificial lamb candidate that a party shrugs at, running for a seat the party doesn’t expect to win.
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Durr is now expected to win.
How does that happen? The simplest explanation is that the district went for Donald Trump by about 1.5 points in 2020 and that the 2021 general election was one in which Republicans overperformed across the board. For many residents of State Senate District 3, that their senator held a leadership position was less important than that his name had a D next to it on the ballot. So Edward Durr, proud truck driver, is probably about to have an unexpected addition to his résumé because he was in the right place at the right time.
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It is not new that people tend to vote along party lines. This is why political parties exist, in part, to make it easier to identify candidates who broadly align with a voter’s politics. But it is still noteworthy how little split-ticket voting appears to have happened Tuesday.
In Virginia, voters cast ballots across 2,455 precincts. In 99.3 percent of those precincts, the winning candidate for governor and lieutenant governor were members of the same party (mostly Republican). But if we go further down the ballot, that partisanship doesn’t erode much. In 95.8 percent of precincts, the same party won the vote for governor, for lieutenant governor, for attorney general and in the delegate race, where you might expect local candidates to be able to buck statewide trends.
You can see that uniformity on the map below. Blue and red circles indicate sweeps by one party in all four races; gray circles are precincts where the vote was split.
Not a lot of gray.
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Even that, though, understates the uniformity of the vote. Excluding precincts where the delegate race was uncontested, the average difference in the two-party vote margin across those four contests was only 5.2 points — meaning that the best outcome for the Democrat and the best outcome for the Republican were only about five percentage points apart, on average. Across those same precincts, the difference in votes received by Democratic or Republican candidates was, on average, about 3.2 percent of the total votes cast. So if a precinct cast 1,300 votes (which was the average in the governor’s race), the difference between the most votes cast for a Democratic candidate and the fewest cast was, on average, 42 votes.
As you might expect, the difference in the two-party margin across the four races was higher in precincts where the results were split between parties. In those precincts, the difference between the biggest victory for the Democrat and the biggest for the Republican averaged 11 points. But that occurred in only one of every 24 precincts.
Interestingly — if not unexpectedly — many of those precincts were located in the suburbs. Suburbs have been (rather famously) at the center of American politics recently, tugged between the deep-blue cities and deep-red rural areas. So it was often there that tickets ended up being split.
This isn’t an academic exercise. It meant that, in Virginia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s relative unpopularity trickled down to other Democrats, helping to cost his party all three executive offices and control of the House of Delegates. It meant that, in New Jersey, the sitting president of the state senate will probably be replaced by a guy who spent on his entire campaign less than a third of what McAuliffe spent on fines to the Board of Elections alone.
Lenny Bronner contributed to this report.