Two weeks before Election Day, I compared the poll numbers with the partisan leans of each state to assess which Democratic Senate candidates were over- and underperforming. Now that we have results, we can make definitive determinations and tease out some lessons.
To recap: We can establish a baseline expectation of how a generic Democratic candidate would perform using the Democrats’ margin of victory in the aggregate national House popular vote (which The New York Times projects will be an eye-popping 14-percentage points) and the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index (which quantifies how much a state leans Republican or Democratic based on the last two sets of the presidential election results).
Since a 14-percentage point margin translates to a 57-43 two-party vote split, a state with a PVI score of R+2 should be expected to have a generic Republican candidate earn a vote share of 45 percent: Two points greater than the national average. In turn, a generic Democrat in an R+2 state should get 55 percent.
So how did the Democratic and independent Senate candidates do? Here’s our ranking of the races in which the Democratic or independent challenger either won or lost by single digits.
1. James Talarico, Texas
Share of two-party vote: 56.2 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +5.2
2. Scott Colom, Mississippi
Share of two-party vote: 50.1 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +4.1
3. Roy Cooper, North Carolina
Share of two-party vote: 60 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +4
4. Adam Hamilton, Kansas
Share of two-party vote: 52.6 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +3.6
5. (tie) Annie Andrews, South Carolina
Share of two-party vote: 52.3 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +3.3
5. (tie) Everett Wess, Alabama
Share of two-party vote: 45.3 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +3.3
7. Jamie Davis, Louisiana
Share of two-party vote: 49.1 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +3.1
8. Jon Ossoff, Georgia
Share of two-party vote: 59 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +3
9. Josh Turek, Iowa
Share of two-party vote: 52.1 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +1.1
10. Sherrod Brown, Iowa
Share of two-party vote: 52.5 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: +0.5
11. Dan Osborn, Nebraska
Share of two-party vote: 46.4 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -0.6
12. Mary Peltola, Alaska
Share of (first-round, incomplete returns) two-party vote: 50.2 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -0.8
13. Chris Pappas, New Hampshire
Share of two-party vote: 57 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -2
14. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan
Share of two-party vote: 53.6 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -3.4
15. Angie Nixon, Florida
Share of two-party vote: 48.5 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -3.5
16. Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota
Share of two-party vote: 55.2 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -4.8
17. Troy Jackson, Maine
Share of two-party vote: 53.8 percent
Performance compared to PVI baseline: -7.6
Does this data tell us anything about what types of candidates did better than others?
Service candidates were strong: Two of the top-performing Democrats were Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, and Hamilton, the founding pastor of a Methodist church with 25,000 congregants. I don’t think that was a coincidence. Clergy are people skilled at communicating, consoling, and empathizing with people from all walks of life, well beyond culturally liberal Democratic circles. Despite having made progressive-coded statements in the past that Republicans sought to sensationalize and exploit, Talarico and Hamilton carried themselves apolitically, transcending the limits of political polarization, which was crucial in winning their red states.
Andrews isn’t in the clergy, but for nearly two decades she practiced as a pediatrician, another profession that requires empathetic communication with a wide range of people. And she was able to connect her pediatric work to her political approach. In an interview with Politico, Andrews described herself as “very pragmatic, radically centrist. I’m a doctor, so I don’t walk into a room of a sick child and say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t have a perfect treatment for this, so I’m just going to move on to the next problem.’ You just do everything hour by hour in the hospital to make the kid a little bit better, a little bit better. So, my job is to represent the views of South Carolinians to move the ball down the field a little bit, not let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Southern Black turnout was big: Everyone is getting to know Scott Colom, who is on the verge of pulling off the electoral upset of the century by becoming the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction, and the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi in 44 years. Even if Colom falls a few votes short, he would still be the second-best Democratic overperformer.
But coming in fifth, tied with South Carolina’s Andrews, is a name few have heard of: Alabama’s Everett Wess. And right after him is, like Wess, another unknown Southern African-American candidate: Louisiana’s Jamie Davis. He shockingly got within two percentage points of toppling Trump’s handpicked nominee without any national media attention or financial help from national party organizations.
All four of these Deep South candidates—as well as Ossoff, the Georgia incumbent who won handily—appear to have benefited from a Black turnout bump. Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst, examined turnout levels for majority-Black and majority-white counties in six Southern states (although he didn’t look at Alabama). He found the turnout percentages higher in the Black counties for all six, with double-digit discrepancies in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Politico’s Jonathan Martin predicted a “Blacklash” driven in part by “the White House-led effort to dilute minority-heavy districts to elect more Republicans and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act,” which busted up several Southern districts that represented African Americans. (Five years ago I wrote in the Washington Monthly how past GOP attempts at voter suppression, using strict voter ID laws, similarly backfired by galvanizing young voters and Black voters.)
Improved performance with white voters probably buoyed these candidates as well, which is a reminder that biracial Democratic coalitions are still possible in the South.
Governors beat U.S. legislators: The recruitment effort of soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer favored candidates who had won statewide, including Cooper (former Governor), Brown (former Senator), and Peltola (former At-Large U.S. Representative). But Brown, who had served in Washington in the House and Senate for 32 years, did not perform nearly as strongly as third-ranked Cooper, who had the experience of earning votes statewide but without the Beltway swamp stench. Brown was a very slight overperformer who won modestly. Meanwhile, Cooper won in a blowout and helped Democrats overcome an attempted GOP gerrymander to flip at least five U.S. House seats.
Alaska’s vote count isn’t over, so we can’t fully assess Peltola’s relative electoral strength yet. As it stands, she looks like a slight underperformer. According to pollsters at Alaska Survey Research, however, the outstanding ballots favor Peltola. If she proves to be more of an overperformer, we might chalk that up to her limited time in Washington, less than two full terms in the House, far less than Brown.
Election Day was not Independence Day: Assuming the Democratic Party’s brand was “toxic” in western parts of the country, four Senate races featured left-leaning candidates who ran as independents and pledged not to caucus with Democrats if they won. In three of those cases—Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho—state Democratic Party officials helped ensure no member of their party would be on the November ballot. In Montana, the Democratic nominee refused to quit.
In all four cases, the independent lost and underperformed the baseline percentage I’ve calculated for a generic Democrat. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn came closest to meeting the baseline, lagging it by 0.6 percentage points. The evidence suggests that the Democratic brand isn’t as toxic as many assumed, and that shunning a party that you are closest to ideologically comes across to voters as coy, if not disingenuous.
Granted, these were all long-shot states, with PVIs that ranged from R+10 to R+18. But Mississippi, which Colom is close to clinching, and Louisiana, where Davis almost provided another upset, are R+11. Both Democratic candidates overperformed, unlike the independents.
It helps to run against a terrible Republican: Turek, a wheelchair-bound Paralympian who won state legislative races on Trump-won turf in Republican western Iowa, had a compelling narrative. But he was only a mild overperformer. That may be because his Republican opponent, Ashley Hinson, lacked the scandal baggage of Texas’ Ken Paxton and Kansas’ Roger Marshall, or the gaffes of Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith and South Carolina’s Darline Graham. Running against what amounted to a generic Republican, Turek largely rode the national Blue Wave to victory.
Are populist progressives laggards? This may be the data point that will produce the most debate. The weakest performers were edgy progressives: El-Sayed, Nixon, Flanagan, and Jackson. Does that mean that progressives are always political risks?
Certainly such a case can be made, but counterarguments based on anomalous circumstances can be offered as well.
Was El-Sayed bogged down by his positions on Medicaid for All and reluctance to embrace Israel’s right to exist? Or was it his combative, sometimes sophomoric, persona that rubbed some the wrong way? Or was the issue that El-Sayed, the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Senate, paid an underperformance penalty from the Republicans’ abhorrent strategy to stoke Islamophobia? Perhaps El-Sayed was cannily defiant so he could confront the smears, limit the damage, and survive the barrage.
Was Nixon’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America a burden in stubbornly red Florida? Or might Nixon have pulled off her own upset if national Democrats spent the gobs of money needed to sufficiently advertise in the sprawling mega-state?
Was Flanagan, who won by 10 points in the light blue state of Minnesota despite the underperformance, too far to the left to run up the score? Or was she, as the state’s Lieutenant Governor, too close to outgoing Governor Tim Walz, who was hammered so hard by a Medicaid fraud scandal he bowed out of running for re-election?
Was Jackson, the worst performer on the list, hampered by a perception that he’s too left-wing? Or was it because he lacks charisma on the stump and can be prickly in debates and interviews? Or was it that Republican attack ads charge him with voting for tax increases and being corrupt as Democratic leader in the state Senate? Or was it simply that Jackson, through no fault of his own, faced one of the toughest Republicans: Susan Collins? Should simply beating a five-termer prove that Jackson is a strong performer, regardless of the margin?
We also have one relative moderate Senate candidate with a negative performance score: Pappas, who nonetheless won with a comfortable double-digit margin in New Hampshire, another light blue state. Was his ideological profile uninspiring? Or can his modest underperformance be explained by his opponent being one of the stronger Republicans in the field: Former Senator John Sununu, part of a Granite State family dynasty synonymous with old-school New England Republican moderation?
With so many competing factors that are hard to isolate and analyze, I’m in no position to adjudicate these questions definitively. But these are the questions Democratic presidential candidates, party operatives, voters, and donors will be asking as they begin to jockey for position in another presidential primary season.
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