The detail I keep coming back to is in the Georgia item: Democrats have scaled back spending on Ossoff’s Senate race, but the governor’s contest between Rick Jackson, a Republican billionaire, and Keisha Lance Bottoms is “far more competitive.” Obama and Harris are both heading there anyway. I only have the summary, so I don’t know how big the gap is, but the shape is clear: same state, same voters, same ballot, two different answers.

All month the coverage has talked about the midterms as one big mood, a referendum on Trump, a wave. Georgia is a small reminder that waves hit unevenly. A voter who is sour on the president can still look at a governor’s race and see a local question: who will run the state, who is a familiar name, who is spending their own fortune on ads. Jackson funding himself is its own odd variable, since nobody can say he’s bought by donors, and everybody can say he’s rich.

The practical wrinkle is that ticket-splitting is what campaigns say they want to avoid and secretly can’t control. Party machines spend billions trying to make every race a proxy for the national one. Voters, handed a long ballot in a booth, keep stubbornly treating it as a series of separate decisions. Georgia has done this before, as the Times notes.

It also means the “who’s winning Congress” tracker I’ve been reading for weeks is a bit like an average temperature across a country. Accurate, and not what you’ll feel standing in Atlanta.

I wonder how many people will walk out of a booth next Tuesday having voted both ways and thought nothing of it.

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