Republicans flipped the Senate, but Democratic candidates often outran the top of the ticket, winning at least four battleground states that Vice President Kamala Harris lost.
Harris lost all seven swing states to President-elect Donald Trump, while her party’s Senate candidates narrowly held Wisconsin, Nevada and open seats in Michigan and Arizona. CNN has not yet projected the Senate winner in Pennsylvania.
Democratic Senate candidates’ success is a bright spot in an otherwise bleak year for the party, which was defending eight competitive Senate seats, including two in states that Trump has won handily in all three of his campaigns. It marks the first time in more than a decade that either party has won multiple Senate seats in states where they lost the presidential race.
Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada received roughly the same number of votes as Harris, while their Republican opponents lost out on tens of thousands of votes that went to Trump.
As of Monday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin – who won the race to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – had won 24,000 fewer votes than Harris in the state, but her Republican opponent received 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won roughly 500 more votes than Harris, while Republican Eric Hovde missed out on 57,000 votes Trump received. And in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen trailed Harris by 3,300 votes, while Republican Sam Brown had received 71,000 fewer votes than Trump.
In Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego, his party’s nominee to replace retiring independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, became the latest Democrat to hold a Senate seat in a state that voted for Trump. As of Tuesday morning, he led Republican Kari Lake by 73,000 votes. Gallego won 90,000 more votes than Harris, while Lake received 165,000 fewer votes than Trump.
In some races, the differences between the Senate candidates’ and Harris’ performances were more pronounced among subsections of the Democratic coalition. In Nevada, Rosen won 50% of the Latino vote, while Brown won 43%, according to exit polls. Latino voters in the state, however, were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with both candidates winning 48%. While Trump won independents by 2 points, Rosen won the group by 6.
This year’s most endangered Democratic incumbents – Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – were seeking reelection in states Trump won in 2020 by 16 and 8 points, respectively. Tester lost his bid for a fourth term to Republican Tim Sheehy, trailing by about 7 points as of Monday afternoon (Harris lost the state by 20 points). Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno, was trailing by 4 points as of Monday, while Harris trailed Trump by 11 points.
“They ran respectable races and damn near pulled it off, but it’s so hard to do, even in a closely run swing state,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Doing it in a red state is now probably impossible.”
Though they won, Moreno and Sheehy also experienced a drop-off of Trump voters.
Overall, Democratic Senate candidates received more votes than Harris in about half of this year’s races, including in less competitive states such as Minnesota, Virginia and Missouri. Republican Senate candidates across the country ran behind Trump in about 80% of states. A notable exception was Maryland, where Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan ran nearly 9 points ahead of Trump and received more than 200,000 more votes. (Hogan lost to Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.)
Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Republicans were “badly outspent” and that “incumbent senators are incredibly difficult to defeat.”
“Senate Republicans have not lost a single incumbent in four years,” Berg said. “We are thrilled that we were able to defeat three entrenched incumbent Democrats last week. We also forced Joe Manchin into retirement.” Democrats did not try to defend West Virginia after Manchin, who left the party to become an independent, decided not to run for reelection.
In addition to Tester and Brown, Republicans are also counting Pennsylvania as a flip. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, where Democratic Sen. Bob Casey is trailing Republican Dave McCormick by 0.6% with 95% of the vote in.
Ticket-splitting has become increasingly rare, especially in presidential election years. In every presidential election cycle between 1968 and 2000, voters backed one party in the presidential race and another for the Senate in at least 10 states, according to an analysis by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. As the rate of split-ticket voting declined at the turn of the century, outrunning the top of the ticket became more challenging.
Of the five Democrats who were elected in states that Republican Mitt Romney won in 2012, three lost reelection in 2018. The other two will not be in office next year: Manchin did not seek reelection, and Tester lost his race. (Across the aisle, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is the only Republican in the chamber to have won while on the ballot with Biden in 2020 or Barack Obama in 2008. Her seat will be on the ballot in 2026.)
“In a challenging political environment Senate Democrats made history — for the first time in over a decade Senate Democrats won multiple races in states carried by the opposite party’s presidential nominee,” David Bergstein, the communications director for Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said in a statement. “This historic achievement is due to the strength of our candidates, the effectiveness of our campaigns and the weakness of the Republicans’ recruits.”
Even before Harris became the Democratic nominee, Senate candidates were running ahead of President Joe Biden. Candidates in battleground states sought to distance themselves from the president while also running on key parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, such as the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare patients and new projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Democratic incumbents highlighted legislation expanding health care to veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and touted their willingness to work across the aisle to pass legislation.
In one ad, Baldwin noted that both Biden and Trump signed bills she introduced to bolster American manufacturing. On costs, candidates from Rosen to Casey vowed to take on “price gouging” from corporations.
After the change atop the ticket, Democrats were more willing to campaign with Harris, who energized the party base in the early days of her 107-day campaign. Slotkin, Casey, Baldwin and Gallego all spoke at the August Democratic National Convention. (Tester, Brown and Rosen skipped the convention altogether.)
Baldwin, Slotkin and Rosen all campaigned with Harris in the final days of the election. In their speeches, they discussed their races but also stressed that their states were key to Democrats’ political future.
“The road to the White House and the road to holding a Democratic Senate run exactly through all of us,” Rosen said at an October 31 Harris rally in Las Vegas.
This story has been updated Tuesday with CNN’s projection in Arizona’s Senate race.
