The narrative of the 2020 election is that Joe Biden did pretty well … but down-ballot Democrats, not so much. And while this is true if you look simply at the results — Republicans defended most of their vulnerable Senate seats and gained several seats in the House — there wasn’t actually as much split-ticket voting as you might think.
For decades now, how a person votes for president has become a better and better predictor of how she votes in other races. As we wrote after the 2018 midterms, the correlation between a state or district’s base partisanship and how it voted for Senate or House that year was extremely strong. And the same looks like it was true in 2020 as well.
The chart below shows the difference between Biden’s vote share and the Democratic Senate candidate’s vote share in the 33 states that held Senate elections contested by both major parties in 2020. And as you can see, people largely voted the same way for both president and Senate. In all but three states, the Democratic Senate candidate’s vote share was within 5 percentage points of Biden’s. (Similarly, Republican Senate candidates’ vote shares were within 5 points of President Trump’s in all but three states.)
The Democratic Senate candidate who most outperformed Biden was Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who received 66.6 percent of the vote — 7.2 points better than Biden. But this won’t surprise anyone familiar with Rhode Island politics. An Army veteran and political moderate, Reed has always enjoyed significant crossover support, winning each of his last three elections with more than 70 percent of the vote. However, it is perhaps a sign of these highly polarized times that Reed’s 2020 vote share was the lowest since he was first elected in 1996. (And it might have been even lower if his GOP opponent hadn’t been disavowed by the Rhode Island Republican Party after it learned of his 2019 arrest on charges of domestic assault.)
On the other end of the spectrum, the Democratic Senate candidate who most underperformed Biden was Chris Janicek in Nebraska, who garnered just 26.2 percent of the vote even as Biden received 39.3 percent. The fact that Janicek underperformed Biden isn’t that surprising, though, as he was also a seriously flawed candidate. The Nebras