There’s no mystery here.
There’s no mystery here.
‘I don’t get it,” President Trump said at a recent White House meeting, according to Politico. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
The president’s confusion is shared by many of his supporters, but there’s really no mystery here.
First of all, the notion that down-ballot Republicans greatly outperformed President Trump is inaccurate. Senate Republicans will hold at least 50 Senate seats in January (with two Georgia races heading to a runoff on January 5), but there is only one state in the country in which Trump lost and a GOP Senate candidate won: Maine. Susan Collins won by eight points even as Trump lost the state by nine points. No one expected a blowout for Collins, but she was widely expected to run far ahead of Trump. In 2008, she won reelection by 23 points even as John McCain lost the state by 17 points.
Almost everywhere else, Trump and the GOP Senate candidates ran closely together.
In Arizona, Trump lost by 0.3 points; Republican Martha McSally lost by 2.4 points.
In Michigan, Trump lost by 2.8 points; Republican John James lost by 1.7 points.
In North Carolina, Trump won by 1.3 points; Republican Thom Tillis won by 1.8 points.
In Iowa, Trump won by 8.3 points; Republican Joni Ernst won by 6.6 points.
In Colorado, Trump lost by 13.5 points; Republican Cory Gardner lost by 9.3 points.
In Georgia, Trump lost by 0.25 points; Republican David Perdue bested his Democratic opponent by 1.8 points as the race headed to a runoff.
The same pattern played out in red states — Montana, Kansas, South Carolina, Alaska, and Texas — where Trump and Senate Republican candidates won by a wide margin.
There was actually much less ticket-splitting between the 2020 Senate and presidential races than there was in 2016 or 2012.
In 2012, Mitt Romney won four red states by double digits — Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and Indiana — where a Republican Senate candidate lost.
In 2016, Republican Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump almost everywhere, in many cases by a big margin. Consider the margin of victory of Trump and GOP Senate candidates in the following 2016 battleground states:
Arizona: Trump+3.5; McCain+12.9
North Carolina: Trump+3.6; Burr+5.7
Florida: Trump+1.2; Rubio+7.7
Iowa: Trump+9.4; Grassley+24.5
Ohio: Trump+8.1; Portman+20.8
Wisconsin: Trump+0.8; Johnson+3.4
Georgia: Trump+5.1; Isakson+13.8
What about the down-ballot House races in 2020? Much has been made of the fact that Republicans greatly exceeded expectations. Before the election, the Cook Political Report rated 27 races as toss-ups, and Republicans won 25 of them with the final two toss-up races (in Iowa and New York) not yet called and coming down to a literal handful of votes.
But there is a difference between greatly exceeding expectations and objectively doing great. And the performance of House Republicans — gaining seats after the 2018 blowout but falling short of a majority — is not objectively that great.
Recall that in 2012, when Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, House Republicans still held a majority. In 2020, Republicans merely gained seats, but will fall five to eight seats short of a majority.
For the last three presidential elections, House GOP candidates have performed better against their Democratic opponents than the Republican presidential candidate performed against his Democratic opponent. In 2012, Romney lost the national popular vote by 3.9 points, and GOP candidates lost the House national popular vote by 1.2 points (and held onto 233 seats). In 2016, Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.1 points, and Republicans won the national popular House vote by 1.1 points (and held 241 seats). In 2020, votes are still being counted in New York and California, but President Trump trails Joe Biden by four points the popular vote and House GOP candidates trail House Democratic candidates by 2.5 points nationwide. Republicans will end up with somewhere between 210 and 213 House seats — not far from the 218 needed for a majority.
It’s not all surprising, then, that Republicans gained back some seats in 2020 after the 2018 blowout in which Republicans lost the House national popular vote by 8.4 points and were relegated to the minority with just 199 seats.
So, the 2020 results down-ballot in Senate and House races are entirely consistent with a presidential election that Trump — despite trailing Biden by more than four points in the popular vote — almost won in the Electoral College. Trump’s loss in the Electoral College came down to some 44,000 individual votes spread across Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. In other words, Biden’s victory was even more narrow in 2020 than Trump’s victory was in 2016, when 78,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan put Trump over the top in the Electoral College.
Biden’s win in 2020 is, of course, just as legitimate as Trump’s win in 2016. Some in the media are downplaying how close the 2020 presidential election was out of simple partisan bias, but another reason why they’re downplaying it is that Trump has been challenging the legitimacy of 2020 results with baseless claims of vote fraud.
If he accepted the results, he might hear more people talk about how close the election really was.
The bottom line is that Republican candidates did better than expected in their races for the House, Senate, and the presidency. But they still came up short of a majority in the House and short of a majority the Electoral College — with control of the Senate to be determined. There’s nothing out of whack with these results.