Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
The six-year cycle of Senate elections is crucial to understanding the chamber's partisan makeup.
A Senate class elected in a midterm will face reelection in a presidential year, and vice versa. The political conditions of the second will be different from the first. A wave election brings in a set of senators who are vulnerable to defeat six years later. The GOP took control of the Senate in the Reagan sweep of 1980, and lost it in 1986. The GOP tied in 2000, suffered a big setback in 2006.
In presidential election years, when voter turnout swells, presidential candidates often receive more votes than Senate candidates, even Senate incumbents. Yet this year, 11 of the 14 Senate Democratic incumbents up for reelection won more votes in their states than Harris.
By contrast, Donald Trump vastly outperformed Republican candidates for Senate, especially in swing states like Nevada and Michigan. Of the eight GOP incumbents up for reelection (not counting Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts, a former governor who was appointed in 2023), Trump had a higher vote total than six of them. The only senators he didn’t outpace were Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, two veterans who are well known in their relatively small-population states.
Trump’s performance last week was a far cry from his first presidential bid in 2016. Back then, Republican candidates for Senate won in spite of him — of the 22 Republican Senate incumbents up for reelection that year, Trump ran ahead of only six of them. His great fortune was that Hillary Clinton was an even larger drag on her party’s ticket — all seven Democratic incumbents up for reelection that year won more votes than her in their home states.
This time around, he provided significant tailwinds, especially for the two Republican senators who had the closest reelection victories — Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Ted Cruz in Texas.
Trump’s transformation from drag on the Republican ticket to boon has Democrats unnerved about the future of their party. Where 2016 may have felt like a terrible nightmare powered by the strangeness of the Electoral College, 2024 felt like a total rebuke. Trump, who went from losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes to winning it (by how many is yet unclear), can no longer be easily dismissed as an aberration governing without a popular mandate.
Ironically, though, in terms of the Senate, the outcome might be better for the Democratic Party moving forward. In 2016, zero states voted for a president of one party and a senator who came from another. This year, if Democrat Ruben Gallego’s lead holds, there are four — Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.
All of that ticket splitting is due in large part to Trump’s strength relative to Harris; his popularity was in some cases not transferable to other Republicans on the ballot with him. He outran the Republican Senate candidates in those four states by huge margins, while Harris had trouble even matching the vote totals from Democratic Senate candidates.
As the dust settles on the 2024 election, Trump resembled a uniquely strong Republican candidate, while Harris ran more like a weak incumbent who voters wanted to punish. That might be a good sign for the future of the Democratic Party.
