Analyzing the midterm results
The 1% controls the outcome
A month after the 2022 election, the results are in for all 470 Congressional races, and we know what the 118th Congress will look like. The Republicans will control the House with 51% of the seats, and Democrats have 51% of the Senate. With more than 112,000,000 Americans casting ballots, how many would have had to swing their vote the other way in order to reverse the outcomes?
Not many, it turns out. Flipping the Senate to a 51-49 Republican majority could have been accomplished by as few as 33,000 voters. On the House side, Republicans would be in the minority if just 3,600 voters (spread across 5 districts) had voted Democrat instead. Put another way, 0.033% of voters determined the control of Congress.
Swing voters have power.
Of course, while it would be ridiculous for this microscopic percentage of voters to claim ahead of time that they’d be able to decide the outcome, a larger fraction of swing voters certainly can. Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, determined 3.5% is the percentage needed for a nonviolent movement to succeed. That fraction of voters nationwide in 2022 could have flipped the outcome of as many as 51 House seats and 7 Senate seats - far more than enough to determine which party has a majority.
Swing voters have power.
The American Union is an effort, built on principled nonviolence, to channel that power into political action by offering a quid pro quo to Congress; pass specific legislation before an election in exchange for votes for reelection. The 2022 proposal to end poverty, mass incarceration, and the endless wars was offered to the to the candidates a few months ago. Although there was some enthusiasm, Congress as a whole declined the offer.
Based on candidates responses and status as an incumbent or a challenger, and without taking party affiliation into account, two batches of endorsements, covering all 470 races, were issued. The first 395 were predominately candidates running against Congressional incumbents (unopposed candidates were endorsed by default), and 21 endorsed candidates won in November.
The remaining 75 contests, though, lacked the traditional challenger/incumbent dynamic, and so random selection, not partisanship, was used to make them. Among these endorsements, 31 House candidates and 2 Senate candidates won. Overall, 11.5% of endorsed candidates won seats in the 118th Congress.
Previous elections show this same pattern, where a very small percentages of voters determines the result. In 2020, President Trump would have won reelection if as few as 22,000 people (across three states) had voted for him instead of Biden. Likewise, Trump would have lost in 2016 as little as 39,000 voters (across three states) had preferred Clinton to him.
Swing voters have power.
The districts which decide the outcome are generally established well in advance. It’s why presidential campaigns ignore the vast majority of states and focus on about one dozen. With Congressional districts codified for the rest of the decade (a few states are exceptions), the competitive contests can be identified for 2024. A fraction of the electorate committed to voting as a bloc of true swing voters can, therefore, say with certainty that they will be deciders, not spoilers.
Next year, a people’s legislative assembly will begin drafting the 2024 package, the metric by which the key decision will be made - have the people and parties in power served America well enough to keep their positions for a few more years? Join the American Union with a $7 monthly contribution to the PAC and a good-faith pledge to vote in concert for endorsed Congressional candidates in 2024. Together, we can win us all a better social contract.