Dem
51
GOP
49
As all of our readers know, a number of the Republican Senate candidates last November were not so great. But how bad were they, really? Political analyst Nathan Gonzales has now worked out a numerical measure of how bad they were.
The basic concept, which reflects a heavy baseball influence, is "Vote Above Replacement" (VAR). It is akin to taking a House candidate's vote share and then subtracting off the district's PVI. So, for example, a Democrat who loses by one point in an R+14 district actually did better than a Democrat who won by 6 points in a D+20 district. Gonzales' metric starts by creating a baseline for each state by creating a trimmed mean, which is obtained by averaging all state and federal elections for the past four years except those very far from the mean in either direction (basically, weird flukes for some reason). The candidate's vote total last November is then reduced by the trimmed mean. So if a Republican candidate gets 48.0% of the vote in a state where historically Republican candidates have gotten 47.0%, the candidate's score is +1.0. This normalizes for the blueness or redness of a state. A Republican who got 48% in Hawaii would be an incredibly strong candidate, but one who got 48% in Wyoming would be an incredibly weak candidate.
Here are the results. Blake Masters got a VAR of -3.9, Herschel Walker got -3.1, Don Bolduc got -2.9, and Mehmet Oz got -0.2, which means they all underperformed typical Republican candidates in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, respectively. In contrast, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) got 2.8, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) got 4.1, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) got 4.1 and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) got 0.5. All of these scores are positive, so they all outperformed typical Democrats in their respective states. Maybe all the praise for Fetterman is a bit overdone. He did slightly better than the average Democrat in a moderately blue state. The real champs are Warnock and Hassan, who greatly overperformed what can be expected of Democrats in Georgia and New Hampshire, respectively.
The VAR scores cast doubt on the many stories about how good Republican Senate candidates Joe O'Dea (CO) and Tiffany Smiley (WA) really were. Their scores were -2.3 and -0.9, respectively. Both did worse than a generic Republican would have done. In North Carolina, Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) had a score of -0.5 but won anyway simply because the Tar Heel State is still a reddish purple. In Ohio, Tim Ryan's score of 3.0 was really good (and the best of any Democratic Senate challenger), but not enough to overcome the Republican lean of the state. The best performing GOP challenger was Joe Pinion (5.2), who was crushed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), but not crushed as badly as Republicans are usually crushed in New York.
The GOP Senate candidate who most overperformed VAR was Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) at 6.1. Other strong Republicans were Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at 3.8 and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) at 3.3, although Rubio may have benefited somewhat from the coattails of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) at the top of the ticket. The Senate candidate with the highest VAR score this past cycle was... Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) at 9.1. He won by 41 points. Even in Vermont for a Democrat that is pretty impressive. (V)