If the Upshot estimates are right, then Democrats will outperform the state’s partisan lean of the state in all but two battleground Senate races: Washington, where Republican Tiffany Smiley held her own against incumbent Democrat Patty Murray, and Florida, where Marco Rubio cruised to re-election by double digits.
This measure isn’t perfect. States like Colorado and Florida may be trending in different directions relative to their historic norms, so results like these may say as much about the electorate as the candidates. We also don’t know what the overall national environment was on Tuesday. Maybe Democrats beat their partisan lean everywhere on Tuesday and not just in these battleground Senate races, although an initial estimate from Pattrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights suggests that Republicans will win the popular vote for the U.S. House, which would make the strong performance of the Democrats in Senate battlegrounds more impressive by comparison.
None of this is surprising — in fact, it’s common: In the 2018 midterms, the results in a number of major Senate races also significantly diverged from the partisan lean of the state. Republicans nominated a series of inexperienced Senate candidates, and such candidates tend to underperform statewide benchmarks. And although the incumbency advantage is smaller than it once was, some of the strongest-performing candidates, such as Rubio and New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan, were incumbents.
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