Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
Four states that Republican Donald Trump carried in this month’s presidential election also elected Democratic senators. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s twice as many “mismatches” between states’ presidential and U.S. Senate results as in all Senate elections held in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined.No states had mismatches in the other direction, electing Republican senators but picking Democrat Kamala Harris for president.
- This year, the states that chose Trump for president and sent a Democrat to the Senate were:Arizona: Rep. Ruben Gallego won the seat that independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is vacating.
- Michigan: Rep. Elissa Slotkin will succeed retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
- Nevada: Incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen fended off political newcomer Sam Brown.
- Wisconsin: Incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin edged out financier Eric Hovde.
The four mismatches, out of 34 Senate elections this year, made for a “mismatch rate” of nearly 12%. That’s the highest since the 2017-18 cycle, when the mismatch rate was 22%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of results going back to 1980. Along with a Democratic win in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, seven out of 35 Senate races in the 2018 midterms (including two special elections) went to a different party than the state’s 2016 presidential vote did.
President-Senate mismatches of this sort used to be fairly common. But since 1990, fewer than half of Senate elections have diverged from their state’s most recent presidential vote – and over the past dozen years, the trend has been for fewer and fewer to do so.
BUT the AZ, MI, and NV results ended with same-party delegations in each state. WI remains split-party.
Hannah Recht and Eric Lau at WP:
Voters in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania — states that Donald Trump won on Nov. 5 — also voted for Republicans to take over Senate seats currently held by Democrats, helping Republicans secure control of the upper chamber.
After these flips, only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.
