The GOP lost every swing state wide election this year except for 1 (PA-Senate). And even that was razor thin in a Red Wave year.
They lost Governors/Senate races in
Arizona Nevada North Carolina Michigan Wisconsin
I know it’s normal for the presidential candidates to receive the most votes on a ballot. But even the Dems that won these races weren’t too far behind Kamala Harris. Yet the Republicans candidates were way behind trump.
Why is this? Do these people literally go to the ballot box just to vote trump and leave?
That’s not how this works. If a state that’s R+20 elects a Republican, but the final results are 55-45, that’s a problem for the GOP in the state and likely nationally. All of the partisan elections in the country are correlated and when a race or class of races falls outside the statistical expectation for that correlation it bears examination. Also, “swing states” isn’t just a marketing buzzword, it’s a term used to describe states that meet a specific criteria.
The November election had an interesting set of results where swing states actually ran left of the national race. That is how you get Michigan and Wisconsin being decided by less than their partisan lean. It’s a result of strong rightward movement in solid blue states, but that’s just an observation of how those numbers come to be, not why.
The actual data on exit polls is starting to come in and soon we’ll have Pew’s final numbers, it’s impossible to draw good conclusions without that data. However, it appears that the electorate was more comfortable voting Republican as a whole than the specific electorates were in more closely contested states. There are many reasons this could be true and the actual truth is likely a mix of all of them, but it’s interesting and both parties will be looking for answers.
I understand swing states and how they are important to follow in presidential elections, but Montana has had a Democratic senator since 2007 and he only lost his position at this election. So even though Montana is deeply red, in a Senate sense it did swing this election - it changed colour.
Thinking of swing states is a useful shortcut when trying to predict the outcomes of presidential elections. I don’t think it should be generalized to Senate elections.