I voted early this year, on the first morning the county opened the doors, in a line that ran out of the Earl B. Fitts Community Center on Third Avenue and most of the way to the street. Early voting started on the fifteenth of October and closed on Halloween, which struck me as either an accident or the most honest thing the Board of Elections has ever done.

A line is the most democratic thing we have left. You cannot buy your way to the front of it, and you cannot scroll past the people in it. I stood for forty minutes between a man in a camouflage cap who had brought his own folding chair and a young woman in scrubs who had come straight off a night shift at the hospital. They did not talk politics. They talked about the price of coffee, which both of them buy at the same gas station, and which both of them agreed had become a kind of personal insult.

The poll workers were the same retired schoolteachers who have been running that room for as long as I can remember, and they treated every one of us the way they once treated seventh graders: with patience, suspicion, and a sticker at the end. I have been handed a great many things in my life by a great many institutions. That sticker is the only one I have ever worn out of the building on purpose.

By Wednesday morning the results were in, the way results always come in, which is to say half the county woke up pleased and the other half woke up early. Congress changed hands. A former governor of ours is going to the Senate. All three amendments to the state constitution passed, though I would wager a good number of people voted on them the way I read software agreements.

But here is the number I keep coming back to. When the pollsters asked people on their way out what had weighed on their vote, eighty-nine percent said the cost of living. Eighty-nine percent of Americans have not agreed on anything since the moon landing, and possibly not then. It took the price of eggs to do it. I do not know what Washington will do with that. I know what the man with the folding chair and the woman in scrubs would tell them, because they told each other, standing in line, for forty minutes, without once asking who the other was voting for.