Democrats did better than Harris downballot, providing glimmer of hope
In his valedictory speech, President-elect Donald Trump rattled off what he claimed were supposed victories in Senate races that propelled Republicans to the majority in the chamber.
“Montana, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin,” Trump said early Wednesday, before boasting how “we’ll be keeping control of the House.”
Eventually, Republicans lost the Senate races in Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. And in the House, Democrats still have a narrow chance to claim the majority – and, at minimum, they staved off the deep losses that usually come alongside losing the presidency.
Despite appearing to secure the popular-vote victory – likely for only the second time for a Republican candidate in the past nine presidential elections – Trump’s coattails did their jobs unevenly.
True, he ran so far ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in Montana and Ohio, by about 12 and 20 percentage points respectively, that he pulled along two novice candidates, though only with single-digit victories.
In the five states that were both presidential and Senate battlegrounds, Trump won all five. Yet Senate Republicans lost four and are projected to win Pennsylvania by such a narrow margin that Democrats haven’t conceded.
In 2016 and 2020, only Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a centrist with a decades-long brand, won a Senate race in a state where the opposing party’s candidate won the presidential ballot.
And in the House, Democrats could at least yield a net gain of a couple of seats that would leave the GOP with the smallest majority in almost 110 years, even smaller than its current majority, which has proved difficult for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to govern.
Normally, the party suffering a multimillion-ballot loss in the popular presidential vote would suffer in lower-profile downballot races, but enough voters in critical battlegrounds split their tickets to avoid a full Democratic wipeout.
Demoralized over Trump’s victory, Democrats have begun to realize that their downballot performance wasn’t so bad, but they wonder what drove so many of their voters away from Harris. Republicans are definitely gleeful over Trump’s commanding win for the presidency but are just beginning to wonder why more voters did not follow suit downballot.
The key takeaway, for Democratic lawmakers and strategists, is that the overall party brand is in poor shape.
Some Democratic policies are popular, but candidates in swing states need to aggressively campaign even in rural places that favor Republicans so that enough voters there will listen.
“If you don’t respect their culture and their lifestyle, they’re not even going to hear you when you talk about your policy positions,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) told reporters Thursday.
Warner’s home-state colleague, Sen. Tim Kaine (D), successfully won re-election and nearly doubled Harris’ margin of victory because of his performance in places like Lee County.
In the southwestern corner county that borders Kentucky and Tennessee, Trump defeated Harris, 86% to 14%, a margin of more than 7,000 votes. The GOP Senate candidate, Hung Cao, underperformed – winning the county by 76%, a margin of about 5,000 votes.
“He didn’t win, but he ran way ahead of the vice president,” Warner said of Kaine’s results in places like Lee County.
He noted that “national Democrats” – who don’t have time to campaign in these rural towns – are perceived as denigrating the culture, while smart Virginia Democrats spend time there.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), considered much more liberal than Kaine, credited that same approach for her narrow victory in a state that Trump won by 1%.
“The way we won this race is the way I have always approached the job: We did everything – everywhere – all at once. I travel to red, purple, blue; rural, urban, and suburban parts of our state,” Baldwin said in her victory speech.
Her prototypical rural performance came in Buffalo County, along the Mississippi River on the western edge of the state. Harris lost by almost 2,500 votes, 30 points, while Baldwin lost by fewer than 1,900 votes, about 25 points.
These culturally conservative voters probably nodded their heads at the Trump campaign ads accusing Harris of supporting gender-affirming care for prisoners, from a 2019 interview she did.
Yet enough of them spared Baldwin, Kaine and Democratic candidates who spent time in their regions.
As of late Friday afternoon, Democratic Senate candidates gained higher shares of votes than Harris did in 78% of counties in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to The Washington Post’s data analysis.
The flip side, of course, is how GOP candidates could not come close to matching Trump, who outperformed them in 97% of counties.
“Republicans win back Senate control, but left races on the table,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate analyst for the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, wrote Thursday.
In House races, Democrats started with 31 incumbents on their “front line” list, those considered in potential danger; at least 28 have won reelection.
And Democrats have knocked off three GOP incumbents with a handful more in races that are too close to call.
Some traditionally liberal strongholds gave Harris only modest wins but Democrats downballot performed fine, particularly in New York.
Harris has received less than 56%, the lowest for a Democrat in the Empire State since 1988. And yet House Democrats flipped three GOP seats that, combined with a special election win early this year, produced a net gain of four seats from New York this year.
The most glaring issue for Democrats is determining how much of Harris’s underperformance is the result of discomfort with a woman of color as commander in chief.
Trump’s margin of victory among men grew by five points from 2020, and the most dramatic voter shift came from Latino men. They favored Biden by 23 percentage points in 2020 only to back Trump by 12 percentage points this year, according to exit polls.
Republicans believe a portion of that shift came from this predominantly Catholic bloc of voters opposing transgender rights and other liberal policies.
“They think that their activists on transgender issues, climate and immigration – all of these activists on what they call social justice – are somehow reflective of the broader country. They are not,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said in an interview on a Catholic news show.
Some Democratic strategists believe that Latino men have suffered such tough economic times that they were more willing to listen to powerful male voices like Trump’s even if they did not believe in his policies.
“It deals with how they view voices in the world and understand them,” Dan Sena, a New Mexico expert who oversaw the House Democratic 2018 effort, told The Post in a pre-election article. “And Latino men, generally, well, there are some Latino men … that will embrace strong and wrong over weak and right.”
Harris won the heavily Latino state, but only by about half as large a margin as Biden did in 2020.
She fell well below the 10-point win racked up by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), whose vote share was little changed from 2018. In the hotly contested congressional race in that state, Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D), who won by less than 1% in 2022, won by four points this time.
And in Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) is leading by 1.1 points as of early Saturday, with remaining votes expected to lean toward the Democrat.
But in Senate races, several Democratic women had success: Baldwin won again in Wisconsin, Rep. Elissa Slotkin won in Michigan and Sen. Jacky Rosen has won in Nevada.
The Republican losses are particularly glaring in Nevada and Arizona, where Trump’s final margin is expected to be several percentage points above Harris’s.
Just enough Trump voters chose him and flipped to Democrats or a different alternative altogether downballot.
In some cases, Senate Democrats caught a break because Trump voters chose him but then voted for a third-party option or left their ballot blank on the Senate race.
In Nevada, 80,000 voters in the Senate race selected a third-party candidate or the state’s unique “none of these candidates” option for president. Another 20,000 who voted in the presidential race skipped the Senate race, helping send Rosen to victory while Harris lost.
In Churchill County, Republican candidate for Senate Sam Brown got 69% of the votes. That seems like a big margin, but Trump got 74% of the vote in that Nevada county east of Reno. Brown conceded defeat Saturday morning.
Republicans in congressional races do not get the same sort of goodwill from these rural voters that Trump receives, while smart Democrats have a chance to earn just enough votes there to be competitive.
National Democrats need to follow Rosen’s and Baldwin’s lead and stump in places like that, Warner said. Otherwise, these voters won’t be willing to listen to their policy pitch.
“They’re never going to hear your position on education or infrastructure or national security,” Warner said. “And I think we’ve got some work to do there.”
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