It’s easy to blame politicians for gridlock on Capitol Hill. It’s the voters, however, and the lack of ticket-splitting, that are key to the lack of compromise. For some reason, people act surprised that a divided country is reflected in a divided Congress.
The bottom line is that there are fewer and fewer mismatched districts and states; places that backed one party’s candidate for president and another party’s choice for House and/or Senate. And thanks to the quadrennial effort by Daily Kos Elections to calculate presidential results by congressional district, we can dive deeper into what happened in 2020.
While some Republicans tried to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s presidential victory because the GOP gained a net of 12 House seats while President Donald Trump lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, that combination is easily explained by district-level results.
Biden finished ahead of Trump in 224 districts, while Trump finished ahead of Biden in 211. That is remarkably similar to the 222-213 Democratic edge in House races, now that the contest in New York’s 22nd District is finally over and we have results in all 435 districts.
2020, a Correction
Basically, Democrats pushed into Trump territory in 2018 and captured some House seats when some of the president’s coalition stayed home. Two years later, when the full Trump coalition came out to vote with the president on the ballot, Republicans recaptured some of those seats. In essence, 2020 was a correction of sorts.
In 2020, with a few exceptions, where Trump won, Republican candidates won and where Trump lost, GOP candidates lost as well. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a similar trend in the other chamber. Of the 69 Senate...