Actually?
If the Democrats HAD won the US Senate it would have been a miracle…
Nope…
But in the end?
Republicans have gain just a handful more of US Senator’s for their party…
And Democrats OVERperformed across the board having fairly close races in places that Republicans should have blown Democrats out…
They will STILL have to deal with Democrats on certain issues in the Senate and they will have to work with Pelosi led Democrats in the House to get anything done…
The Trump party hold on Congress is over….
What the “split decision” narrative sometimes misses is just how well Democrats performed in the Senate despite having to defend more seats than Republicans1 — and in territory that was largely more favorable to the GOP.
Much of this is overshadowed because Democrats did lose Senate seats. But if we look at a state’s partisan lean2 and the vote share margin in each Senate race, we see Democrats managed to outperform how their states leaned politically in almost every single race — including in the 10 states with a Democratic incumbent that President Trump won in 2016.
Some of what we’re seeing here is probably related to the overall Democratic-leaning national environment — the popular House vote margin currently sits at D+7. But in 27 of the 33 Senate races included in the chart,3 Democratic candidates outperformed the partisan leans of their states. And there were four contests where Democratic incumbents fared 20 points or better than their state’s political baseline — and three of them won. This helped Democrats hold onto seats in two heavily Republican states — West Virginia and Montana — and easily win one seat in a likely 2020 battleground —Minnesota…