Split Ticket

Political observers can readily recall the 2024 election outcome, with Trump’s sweep of the swing states being paired with Republicans trailing elsewhere downballot. Despite an arguably-favorable mid-decade redistricting cycle, Republicans lost two seats in November, which halved their House majority.

The final tally showed that Kamala Harris stood 1.7% away from holding the White House for the Democrats, while a 1.0% shift in three House seats would have handed the Speaker’s gavel to Hakeem Jeffries. Was there really a mandate for change up and down the ballot? Did the American people really vote for major reform on all levels?

This is a question best answered if there was a way to account for uncontested seats across the country. We’ve previously done work on this subject in 2022, which you can read here. To summarize, the reason we created a new framework to understand the “real” generic ballot is because simply tallying the votes for Republicans and Democrats does not account for uncontested seats. This means the final, “official” topline is an inaccurate representation of the true mood of the electorate.

Every year, over thirty districts only have one of the two major parties represented on the ballot. Especially in lopsided districts, the less-popular party can struggle to find a candidate willing to jump through campaign hoops with little hope of winning, as funds and party support generally get spent in competitive seats where such efforts can be more fruitful. To get a good sense of the national mood, it’s important to determine a partisan vote estimate for these districts.

Justification aside, here are the 2024 results of this model.

The model estimates that if every House race were contested, we’d expect the Republicans to lead the popular vote by just over 2.1%, with about 75.9 million votes to the Democrats’ 72.7 million. The GOP would have performed nearly identically to their 2022 modelled result, with a marginal improvement of just half a percent from two years ago.

There was little topline difference between the Presidential and Congressional election outcomes. In fact, this cycle saw the smallest gap (0.50% — with Trump leading by 1.65% in the 50 states, and the House Republicans at 2.15%) between the two concurrent federal elections as far back as we’ve applied this model, back to 2008.

Interestingly, this is the third election in a row where the tipping-point House seat leaned to the left of the country. 2020’s MN-02 was 0.16% to the left of the country, while 2022’s IA-03 was 0.90% off the national mark, and 2024’s PA-07 was 1.14% away from the national vote. I wouldn’t recommend extrapolating this trend, but far gone are the days of an unbridled Republican gerrymandering locking in an electorally-unpopular GOP House majority.

This election also breaks from the rest of the Trump era, as House Republicans outperformed their flagbearer by 3.5% in 2016 and 2.2% in 2020, but only by 0.5% this cycle. This may give the impression that ticket splitters have disappeared, as the difference between the two ballot lines has eroded significantly.

But the story is not so clear-cut. Even as they fell narrowly short of flipping the House, many House Democrats outperformed Harris by double digits in right-swinging urban districts like NY-06, IL-04, and CA-52. This means that even if House Republicans continued to generally outperform Trump elsewhere in the country, the existence of these “Trump Democrats” means that on the top line, the two performances would appear numerically similar.

This is supported by the statistical distribution of overperformances. The mean difference between the presidential and congressional margins in seats contested by both parties was 4.2% in 2024, but 4.6% in 2020, a downward trend but far from 2016’s figure of 8.7%. This means that although ticket splitting does appear to be on the decline, it alone can not explain the similar performances. Instead, it’s due to similar numbers of voters splitting their ticket in opposite ways: millions split for Trump and downballot Democrats, while a similar, but slightly greater, number voted for Harris and House Republicans.

But change between cycles is important, too. Comparing these results to those from two years ago, we get the following map:

The largest swings are seen in Alaska and South Dakota, each for a different reason.

This year, South Dakota had its first Republican-versus-Democrat matchup since 2018, so the SHAVE for the previous two cycles were based on the 2020 presidential results, masking Rep. Dusty Johnson’s tendency to overperform. (It’s not likely that Johnson only suddenly became popular this year.) 

In Alaska, an effective rematch between former Rep. Mary Peltola and freshman Rep. Nick Begich saw Begich better consolidate the Republican-voting share of the electorate without Sarah Palin on the ballot. This led to a narrow win and a large topline swing to the GOP in the state.

We can adjust for the nationwide swing by mapping out the trend, seen below.

There’s no clear, broad trend in this map, but perhaps those Southeastern states which swung left saw African-American voters more engaged in the presidential race than the 2022 midterm elections. Louisiana in particular stands out, with an 8-point trend to the left. Meanwhile Nevada also swung to the left, despite Trump having flipped the state.

These two states, along with another outlier, South Dakota, involved uncontested seats in either this cycle, the past one, or both, perhaps revealing limitations of this model in properly replicating “generic” support. However, it is a significant improvement from simply reading off the popular tally. (In Nevada’s case, Republicans led Democrats by over 11%, a totally unreasonable figure.)

We can also compare the results to those from the previous presidential election. 

With a national swing of 4.2% to the right, it’s no surprise that most of the country is red. Since differences between the states are a little hard to visualize, the relative change between the two presidential cycles is probably best shown with a trend map.

Notable exceptions like Alaska stand out, where local institution Rep. Don Young’s final re-election was replaced with the comeback performance of freshman Rep. Nick Begich III. Clearly, in smaller states, local political trends and shakeups can notably alter the SHAVE reading as personal brands on the ballot change.

Here, the urban bias of Republicans’ recent gains is even more clear. The majority of their gains come from the aforementioned four largest states, while the rest of the country trended left. Now, of course, this does not mean the GOP will necessarily lose support in Middle America, but it does show that the recent popular vote victories were built on increased support in the country’s largest states, particularly in denser, more concentrated, population centers.

It’s for this reason that the electoral college bias has nearly disappeared, with the difference between the “tipping point state” (Pennsylvania) and the popular vote being a mere 0.23%. Republicans are gaining votes and voters, but in a way that has effectively erased (or even reversed, in the case of the House) their former geographic advantage.

It’s also for this reason that Republicans had difficulty winning the House in the past two cycles. Although skewed turnout dynamics in 2022 and pro-Trump persuasion effects in 2024 have helped them win the House popular vote twice in a row, their new coalition is less “electorally efficient” than before. On net, Republicans have effectively swapped losses in competitive suburbs for gains in less-competitive rural and urban districts.

With this, we can determine that although Republicans did win a majority, and one with more backing than would be suggested by the seat distribution, it can not be asserted that Republicans can rest on these laurels and expect continued guaranteed future growth in urban America.

Democrats once noted gains in America’s major metros, and perhaps grew too confident that increasing urbanization, diversification, and college education would spell a solid Democratic majority, the so-called “Obama coalition”. But these gains have since soured, as Republicans are surging in urban cores and among nonwhite voters, and college attendance is plateauing.

Perhaps the only thing that can be concluded from this election is that Trump and his allies have been entrusted to govern the country by a coalition of voters who only made up almost exactly one-half of the country. As the electorate grows increasingly unhappy with their re-hiring decision, the White House will need to formulate a strategy to hold on to their tenuous House majority, with little room for electoral defections. With just over 600 days to go, the clock is already counting down to what could either be yet another rejection of Trumpism, or a true mandate for Trump to finish his final four years as envisioned.