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**DECEMBER 1, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

Why the Democrats Flopped in House and Senate Races

So if Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes and more than six million more
popular votes than Donald Trump-and he did-why did the Democrats go
down in a heap in the Senate and House elections?

One way to begin to understand this split verdict is to look at the
number of House districts that Biden carried. According to an estimate

provided by

**The Atlantic**'s invaluable Ron Brownstein, Biden got more votes
than Trump in 223 congressional districts. Not coincidentally, the next
House will likely have 222 Democratic members-giving them a measly
majority of four.

That doesn't mean there's a one-to-one correspondence between the
districts Biden carried and those that House Democrats won. It does
mean, though, that American voters are ticket-splitting a lot less than
they used to. When all the votes for all the contests are counted,
probably fewer than 20 districts will have voted for one party's
candidate for president and the other party's candidate for Congress.
In both the Nixon landslide of 1972 and the Reagan landslide of 1984,
the number of split-ticket districts was roughly 190.

Still, when the popular votes in House elections are done being tallied,
I wouldn't be surprised if, like Biden, the House Democrats come out
with a six-million-vote margin over the Republicans. Big cities are home
to a great many districts where Democratic House candidates carry 80
percent of the vote or thereabouts. Republicans increasingly carry rural
districts by considerable margins, but with nothing like the numbers
Democrats put up in major metropolises.

The Democrats' problem is the distribution of voters. Given not only
the gerrymandering of districts but also, more fundamentally, their
contiguousness, Republicans have a structural advantage built into our
governmental system-not just in the House, but in the Senate, the
Electoral College, and state legislatures-so long as they are the
dominant party in rural and exurban America and so long as the Senate
and Electoral College disproportionately reward small states.

As I argued in my print piece
in the
forthcoming issue of the

**Prospect**, the national identity of the parties has come to eclipse
the more localized identities of House and Senate candidates (for which
the disappearance of local news outlets is partly to blame). Democratic
Senate challengers carried Arizona and Colorado, as did Biden, and lost
North Carolina, Iowa, and Montana, as did Biden. Only Republican Susan
Collins received enough split-ticket votes to buck this party-line trend
(Trump lost Maine, but she prevailed). Even more remarkable is the
electoral record of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, a solid liberal who
keeps winning elections in the otherwise increasingly Republican state
of Ohio. There's a lesson for Democrats in Brown's relentless and
principled commitment to the working class, in his mantra of "the
dignity of work." That phrase was repeated multiple times by Biden,
Kamala Harris, Janet Yellen, and Biden's other economic nominees at
their rollout event today in Wilmington. In an America where
split-ticket voting is going the way of the dodo, the Democrats would do
well-politically, economically, morally-to take their cues from
Brown.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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