The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be a coin flip. I could write an entire article about how that doesn’t necessarily mean the actual outcome was supposed to be close, but I don’t think anyone on Kamala Harris’ team anticipated her doing so badly.
She lost every single one of the seven states classified as “most competitive” by the New York Times. Even normally safe Democrat states had surprising results — Harris won New Jersey by only 6 points and New York by just 13. In contrast, Biden won those states by 16 and 23 points, respectively.
There have been myriad think pieces on why Kamala did so poorly. Some people say she was too conservative. Some say she was too left-wing. Still others are blaming minorities for abandoning Democrats (despite the fact that the White vote went overwhelmingly Trump).
I’m not here to opine on any of that. Instead, this article focuses on contextualizing Kamala’s performance by comparing her to Democratic Senate candidates who ran this year. There were 34 senate seats up-for-grabs this election, but a lot of them were total blowouts in safe states like Rhode Island or Mississippi. Since voting dynamics in blowout elections are kind of funky, this article focuses on the 10 Senate races that were “competitive”. I define “competitive” as any race where the final margin was less than 10 points. We can then compare Kamala’s performance versus the Democrat Senate candidate in those states.
Without further ado, let’s jump into this short article.
Historical Performance
We’ll begin by comparing how Kamala performed in these “close race states” versus other candidates who lost the Presidential Election since 2000. In the visual below, I tracked when the (losing) Presidential candidate received more votes than their party’s Senate candidate in that state. Recall that we’re only considering states where the Senate race was within 10 points. Additionally, I consider it a tie if the difference between the Presidential and Senate candidate’s performance was <0.5% (e.g. 49.5% vs 49.9%).
Here, we see the stark failure of the Harris campaign. Even when compared to other Presidential campaign losers, she performed historically badly. Since 2000, every losing Presidential candidate has received substantially more votes than their party’s Senate candidate in at least four states. And the net votes between those Presidential and Senate candidates has always been positive. Overall, those losing candidates received more votes across all the close race states. This kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people who only vote for president and leave the rest of their ballot blank.
In contrast, Kamala only outperformed the Democratic Senate candidate in one state (New Jersey). And across all the states, she received over 400,000 fewer votes than Democratic Senate candidates.
Okay, so Kamala did historically poorly. But there was also a lot of pre-election talk about how Trump would drag down the GOP ticket. If that were true, we would expect Trump to similarly underperform his party’s Senate candidates. Let’s take a look.
Yeah, so that pre-election talk was probably wrong. Trump did historically well. In fact, Trump outperformed the GOP Senate candidate in every single close race state. That hasn’t been done since Bush in ’04. Furthermore, he received 1,600,000 more votes than those Senate candidates. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. So, in essence, Trump received an entire West Virginia’s worth of votes more than GOP Senate candidates in these 10 close race states.
Let’s dial in on the performance of Trump and Kamala in these ten close race states to see if we can learn anything more.
2024 Performance
First, we’ll begin with a state-by-state comparison of the total votes and vote share received by Kamala in each of these states.
These visuals really hammer home how systematically poorly Kamala Harris did. Places like Montana and Ohio had close Senate races. But these states were total blowouts for Trump.
Speaking of Trump, let’s see just how much better he did than the GOP Senate candidates.
Conclusion
Looking at these numbers, we can conclude that Kamala did historically badly. She lost Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, even though the Democratic Senate candidate from those states won. In fact, if Kamala performed identically to the Democratic Senate candidate in each of the ten close races, she would have come very close to winning the electoral college:
Even then, she wouldn’t have won. The fact that Democrats struggled so mightily against a ticket headed by Donald J. Trump is damning. There needs to be some serious soul searching done by the party before the 2026 midterms if Democrats wish to blunt the incredible harm that Trump and his team plan on implementing. Perhaps they can start by stopping these infuriating emails and texts begging for money even after a whopping defeat. I cannot imagine this is encouraging any would-be Democrat voters.
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