Shortly before the election, I wrote about the increasing correlation between Senate and presidential votes.
In the wake of last month’s elections, where four Democratic Senate candidates prevailed in states Donald Trump won, some pundits are pronouncing an end to, or at least a respite for, that correlation.
I think they misunderstand both the data and the mechanism.
No doubt the precipitous decline in Senate mismatches — states where different parties won the presidential and Senate contests — is part of the evidence for the correlation.
In 1986, 59 percent of Senate races were won by the party that lost the 1984 presidential contest in that state. That was the peak year for presidential/Senate mismatches, but through the late 1990s mismatches ran over 30 percent.
Things changed in 2020 when just one Senate election produced a mismatch between the party of the Senate victor and the party the state’s presidential winner.
2022 also yielded just a single mismatch.
2024’s four mismatches seem to upend the pattern. However, the single mismatches in ’20 and ’22 are outliers.
This year’s four mismatches translate into 12 percent, far less than the 59 percent record in 1986 or even the 30 percent we saw through most of the........