There Wasn’t That Much Split-Ticket Voting In 2020
The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein estimatesthat Biden carried about 223 House districts — almost exactly the same as the 222-224 seats Democrats will hold in the next Congress.
To be more specific, Democrats have already clinched 222 seats, and there are two races — Iowa’s 2nd District and New York’s 22nd District — that could still go either way.
In seeking to explain why Biden racked up a gaudy electoral-vote total but Democrats performed poorly in the Senate and House, there have been all sorts of theories — one common one being that voters, anticipating a Biden win, preemptively voted Republican for Congress to give Biden some checks and balances. But as we have seen, there just isn’t much evidence for that. The vast majority of voters voted the same way for president and Congress, and while there were undoubtedly some people who split their tickets between Biden and congressional Republicans, there were also some who split their tickets between Trump and congressional Democrats.
A better take is that Democrats “performed poorly” in the Senate and House simply compared with pre-election expectations. But they still won more House seats than Republicans did, and arguably, the main reason they didn’t do better in the Senate is because of the chamber’s Republican bias. In reality, Democrats performed about the same in all three races, but the structures through which those results were filtered — the Electoral College, the Senate seats that happened to be up and a House map biased toward Republicans — produced different results.
The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein estimatesthat Biden carried about 223 House districts — almost exactly the same as the 222-224 seats Democrats will hold in the next Congress.
To be more specific, Democrats have already clinched 222 seats, and there are two races — Iowa’s 2nd District and New York’s 22nd District — that could still go either way.
In seeking to explain why Biden racked up a gaudy electoral-vote total but Democrats performed poorly in the Senate and House, there have been all sorts of theories — one common one being that voters, anticipating a Biden win, preemptively voted Republican for Congress to give Biden some checks and balances. But as we have seen, there just isn’t much evidence for that. The vast majority of voters voted the same way for president and Congress, and while there were undoubtedly some people who split their tickets between Biden and congressional Republicans, there were also some who split their tickets between Trump and congressional Democrats.
A better take is that Democrats “performed poorly” in the Senate and House simply compared with pre-election expectations. But they still won more House seats than Republicans did, and arguably, the main reason they didn’t do better in the Senate is because of the chamber’s Republican bias. In reality, Democrats performed about the same in all three races, but the structures through which those results were filtered — the Electoral College, the Senate seats that happened to be up and a House map biased toward Republicans — produced different results.
