One striking pattern hidden in the election results

Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and Democrats lost control of the Senate. 

But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.

In recent years, the outcome of a state’s US Senate race has increasingly matched the outcome of its simultaneous presidential race. Ticket-splitting has decreased in our era of polarization and partisanship. The vast majority of people voting for a presidential candidate also vote for their party’s Senate candidate.

But not everyone does that. And there’s still some variation in how much better or worse Senate candidates do compared to the top of the ticket. Looking at that variation can provide clues about what sorts of candidates overperform (even if they don’t actually win).

It can also help shape our understanding of national trends. Was there a nationwide backlash against all Democrats? Or was the backlash mostly limited to the presidential candidate?

In 2020, Republican Senate candidates overperformed Trump in most swing states, suggesting that Trump was a drag on the GOP. This year, Democratic Senate candidates overperformed Harris in almost every key race — though often it wasn’t by enough for Democrats to win.

Here’s how the Senate candidates in key races performed compared to Harris. The counts aren’t yet finalized so the margins are subject to change, but this is how things looked as of early Wednesday afternoon.

• Nebraska: Independent Dan Osborn’s vote share is about 7 points higher than Harris, but he lost.
• Montana: Sen. Jon Tester’s vote share is also about 7 points higher than Harris. He also lost.
• Ohio: Sen. Sherrod Brown’s vote share is about 4 points higher than Harris. He lost.
• Arizona: Rep. Ruben Gallego’s vote share is about 4 points higher than Harris and he’s currently leading even though Harris seems on track to lose there.
• Texas: Rep. Colin Allred’s vote share is about 3 points higher than Harris, but he failed to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz.
• Nevada: Sen. Jacky Rosen’s vote share was about 2 points higher than Harris. Her race is too close to call.
• Wisconsin: Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s vote share was less than a point higher than Harris’s, but Baldwin defeated her challenger, Eric Hovde, while Harris lost the state.
• Michigan and Pennsylvania: Both Democratic Senate candidates in these states (Rep. Elissa Slotkin and incumbent Sen. Bob Casey) have vote shares about 1 point higher than Harris’s. Neither race has been called.

The pattern was also evident in less competitive races like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Virginia, where Democratic Senate candidates outperformed Harris.

One notable exception to Tuesday’s down-ballot overperformance trend was Florida, where Debbie Mucarsel-Powell did about the same as Harris (and lost). There’s also Maryland, where Angela Alsobrooks won but did significantly worse than Harris — but that has an obvious explanation in that the state’s popular former governor, Larry Hogan, was the Republican Senate nominee (though his popularity wasn’t enough to power him to a win in an otherwise blue state).

So why were there so many voters casting their ballots for Trump and Democratic Senate candidates?

Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race.

My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally. (This is also reflected in the House of Representatives contest currently looking somewhat close and in Democratic success at the state level in places like North Carolina.)

Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.