How did Trump win states that Republican Senate candidates lost?

Ray Bogan: In Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, Donald Trump won the presidential vote while the Republican Senate candidate lost. This is going to have a big impact on the balance of power in Washington. How did it happen? Well, here to explain is one of our nation’s preeminent pollsters, Professor Darren Shaw from the University of Texas at Austin. So, Professor Shaw, I just mentioned the results in those four key states. How did that happen?

Daron Shaw: 

Well, I think in political science, we’ve been enamored with the notion of polarization, that voters identify as Republicans or Democrats and that they really dislike the other side. And so there’s very little ticket splitting. This is the theory, right? I’m gonna vote for the Republicans up and down the line, or I’m gonna vote for the Democrats up and down the line. That’s kind of been our orientation with respect to elections over the last decade plus. Well, here we have an instance in which at some number of voters, a decisive number of voters, split their tickets between Trump and the Senate candidates. I think the most obvious explanation is that in these races, not all of them, but in most of them, Michigan was the exception, Democrats were the incumbents. So the Democrats walk into the race with higher levels of name recognition. Voters prefer to vote for somebody they know over somebody they don’t know. And in each of those races, Michigan included, the Democratic candidates had significantly more money to spend.

So you’re talking about Republicans across the board, whether it’s Sam Brown, I guess Kari Lake is the exception in Arizona, but Sam Brown in Nevada, McCormick in Pennsylvania, et cetera, these are candidates who were challengers. And they needed to familiarize the electorate with who they were. And while they were trying to do that, they were facing, especially in the case of Nevada, which I think is the exemplar here, hundreds of millions, not hundreds, tens of millions of dollars of negative advertising being dropped on their heads as voters are getting to know them. So in the summer you saw splits of 10 to 15 points separating where Trump was versus Harris compared to where the Democrat was versus the Republican Senate candidate. As the campaign wore on, those differences diminished significantly, but not entirely. So you ended up in each of those states with a slight gap, but not a huge gap between where Trump was running versus the Republican candidates. So voters did mostly come home, but not enough to save the Republicans in those races.

Ray: 

So elections have become very nationalized over the last few cycles in the sense that there’s some instances where maybe big donors, congressional leadership, and maybe even the media kind of make it try to seem as though it’s not about a candidate, it’s about a majority. And that’s all they focus on is the majority. But based on these results and what you seem to be telling me right now, and correct me if I’m wrong, is when voters go to the polls, they don’t look at it like that.

Daron Shaw: 

Yeah, there’s some evidence and it’s a little little moth eaten right now. It is to say it’s about a couple decades old that voters actually like to what we call policy balance. So if they vote for a Republican, sometimes they’re they say they’re concerned about, you know, handing over the reins of government to a single party and so they vote to balance, sort of policy balancing is the notion when they vote. I think that’s after the fact rationalization. I don’t think voters actually do a lot of that.

But what you saw in each of these states was Republicans trying to nationalize the election, because Trump was running very strong in these different states, to say, well, they may say they’re moderate, Gallegos in Arizona or Jacky Rosen in Nevada may say they’re moderate, but they’re going to end up voting with Kamala Harris 100 % of the time or 95 % of the time to basically minimize state and local issues and to, draw national level forces, because they thought that advantaged them.

The Democrats were, I think in almost all these states, largely trying to say, ‘Well, I’m going to work for the people of state X. And I’ve got a record doing that. And with the exception of Slotkin in Michigan, all of them were incumbents. And they managed to do that. So I do think what the evidence is is that you’re right. Nationalization exists, it basically kind of drives up almost all the difference between Senate and presidential candidates. But you can still affect an advantage of a couple of points by positioning yourself as distinct from the national party working for the people of a given state or jurisdiction.

Ray: 

You know, as I mentioned, this is going to have a big impact on the balance of power. These four races that we’re discussing is the difference between Republicans having a nearly filibuster proof majority with 57 seats. Instead, they’re on track to have 53, which I guess you could kind of describe as a slim majority. Have you ever seen split ticket voting have this big of an impact on the power aparty will wield in Washington. this case, Republicans will have to be a lot more bipartisan to pass legislation.

Daron Shaw: 

Really good question. I’m sort of racking my brain historically to think of an instance in which, know, essentially states that voted one way for president. Well, I think historically it actually did used to happen quite a bit, but it didn’t affect the balance of power the same way that seems to be now for the reasons that you mentioned. In other words, the seats in the states in which they vote one way for presidential, but the other way for Senate, those are really disappearing. You know, the West Virginians of the world or the Montanas. Those were instances in which there were real outlier candidates, Manchin or Tester. Those people are essentially gone and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, same kind of deal. But very narrowly decided states, it does seem to be possible that you can kind of be on the out party and still win a Senate seat in those places. And those states are very likely to flip next time around too, right? I mean, the Trump majority may not last as long as 2026 because it was so narrow in some of these battleground states. But yeah, you’re right. You’re talking about a bunch of them because these are the 2018 Senate seats that came up a big time Democratic year. And in a year where it was more equal, those people were all the chopping block. And the fact that the Democrats basically kind of split those states or even won most of them actually, if you’re counting precisely, it is going to have profound implications. And if you get, I’m not predicting this, but if

One or two of these individuals retires, pardon the Republican jury, retires, goes to the Supreme Court, runs for president or something like that, takes themselves out. That Republican majority comes into peril immediately. You’re also the starting point for 2026, which is midterm election and the majority party is always at risk in the midterm election. There’s going to be even a larger target on the backs of some of those Republican candidates defending seats in 2026.

It’s not only important for the immediate policy implications, but it’s also important because the Democrats don’t need to flip seven seats next time around. They only need to flip three.

Ray: 

And then finally, let me ask you, you sit on a decision desk and you are a part of the team that’s behind the scenes, that’s getting data from all over the country and projecting who is going to win each state. I’m curious, we got our results a lot faster this election than we did in 2020 when it was Trump v. Biden. Did you notice any states doing anything better to help us get those results quicker? Did they count mail-in ballots in a more efficient manner? Was there anything that took place that you can put your finger on that says, that’s why we know the results so much sooner this time around?

Daron Shaw (08:10)

Yeah, I think mechanically the issue that occurred was that the Republican party in general, and Trump in particular, encouraged their voters to vote by mail and to vote early. And you might ask, well, what does that have to do with the counting of the votes? What it meant was is that the outstanding votes didn’t vary as much by mode. In other words, in a lot of states where Biden had had an 80 to 20 edge in the mail-in vote in 2020, that edge was, 60-40 or 55-45 this time around. That meant that the shift in the vote as late votes were counted, as provisionals, as all these other votes came in, wasn’t going to change the result nearly as dramatically. And we knew that going in. The 2020 situation created an environment, particularly in places like Pennsylvania, where you knew that 100,000 vote deficit could disappear because there was going to be such a strong tilt to the mail-in ballots that were going to be counted.

This time around, we suspected, and it turned out to be true pretty quickly, we had confirmatory data both from the poll and then from the vote count, those differences weren’t gonna be as significant, right? You weren’t gonna see those sorts of shifts. As for mechanically, I think it’s pretty clear. A couple of states went to a system where two things happened. They insisted on receiving the ballot by election day, that was one, as opposed to a postmark by election day. That helped. And then the processing of the mail-in ballots,

places, jurisdictions that allowed their election administrative boards to process. So vote counts are a two step process. You or I vote by mail, they get the ballot and they have to do a signature check to make sure it’s us. When that’s done, that’s processing. They put the vote into the count pile. And then on election day, they can count. Allowing states to pre-process that mail and vote eliminates one of those steps so that by election night, you can just count the votes.

That seems to be extremely effective. And I know there are people who say like, yeah, what about people who turn in their ballot a day ahead of time and it doesn’t get received by the election registrar? That’s always the downside of this sort of arrangement. And that’s why Arizona and Nevada and California and actually Alaska are still counting votes at this point. I think you’re gonna see a movement away from that to allow pre-processing and to insist upon receiving the ballot by election day.