2022 midterm elections: Biden states will decide who controls the Senate

“I think Biden’s numbers will very much drive the 2022 elections,” says Republican consultant John Brabender.

A pivotal question for Democrats is whether Biden has a better chance of recovering at least somewhat by November in the states that he won — and where more voters therefore have some history of viewing him favorably. Or, failing that, whether in these states that rejected Trump in 2020 (and in some cases 2016 as well), Democratic Senate candidates can survive even lackluster numbers for Biden by reminding voters what they don’t like about the GOP alternatives.

“It’s not just a referendum on Biden,” insists Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked for the President during the campaign. “In Senate races you have the resources to make it a real choice; it doesn’t have to be a derivative choice of an affirmation of the president or not.”

Ticket-splitting declines

The basic trend of Senate results aligning more thoroughly with presidential results in the same state is one of the most powerful dynamics of modern American politics — and a big shift from the politics during the second half of the 20th century. The first decades after World War II were a heyday for ticket-splitting in Senate elections. Republicans, for instance, held only about half the Senate seats in the states that voted twice for GOP Presidents Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The reason Senate and presidential results diverged in so many states is that many voters in that era voted for one party for president and the other in Senate races. (The same dynamic largely shaped the results of House races in these years as well.) Data from the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies found that during the 1970s one-fourth of voters backed Senate candidates of one party and presidential nominees of the other, and nearly that many did so again in the 1980s, according to analysis by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. The phenomenon was most intense those years in the South — where conservative Whites backed GOP presidential nominees but still pulled the lever for conservative Democrats in congressional elections — but not confined to that region.

But as American politics has grown more polarized since the 1980s, such split-ticket voting has plummeted. More people have treated their votes for Senate (and also House races) less as a choice between two individuals than as a quasi-parliamentary referendum on which party they wanted to control Congress — a judgment that increasingly pivoted on their assessments of the president and his party. Just 1 in 6 people split their votes between presidential and Senate races in the 1990s, according to Abramowitz’s calculations. The number of split-ticket voters, though oscillating somewhat from election to election, has fallen even further during presidential contests in this century, frequently dropping to only about 1 in 10.

The remaining five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — flipped from supporting Trump in 2016 to backing Biden in 2020. Democrats now hold eight of their 10 Senate seats.

In each column of that ledger, those numbers could shift after this fall’s elections:

Chilling precedent for Democrats

Similarly, in the 2014 midterm elections, Democrats lost 14 of the 15 Senate races in states where Obama’s approval rating stood at 42% or less, according to the exit polls. In 2010, Democrats likewise lost 13 of the 15 where Obama stood at 47% or less. In 2006, Republicans lost 19 of the 20 Senate races in states where President George W. Bush’s job approval stood at 45% or less.

That history, and Biden’s current distress, raise two core questions. One is whether the President has a better chance to rebuild his approval rating by November in states he won than in those he lost because more voters have histories of viewing him positively. Lake, the Democratic pollster,…