Did the Realignment reach downballot?
Echelon Insights's Split Ticket Atlas provides some clues
After each election cycle, me and my colleagues at Echelon Insights put together the Split Ticket Atlas, comparing Donald Trump’s performance to Republican Senate candidates.
The 2024 edition was just released today, containing data on every state over the last two cycles with contested two-party Senate races, and you can download your copy here:
One of the questions I often get asked is whether Trump’s multiracial populist coalition will show up for Republicans downballot. While Trump is unique in his appeal to realigning groups, the data here shows that there’s too much pessimism on this count among the Republican consulting class.
Let’s take a look at the Split Ticket Atlas for Texas over the last couple of cycles:
In 2020, John Cornyn overperformed Trump statewide, while Ted Cruz underperformed him in 2024—part of a consistent pattern of Trump overperforming Senate candidates in 2024 in a way he really didn’t do the other times he was on the ballot.
But both Texas Senators largely underperformed Trump in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley, Cruz by more since his overall performance compared to Trump was less than Cornyn’s.
The larger point, not directly shown on this map, is that there was yet another sea change the Rio Grande Valley from 2020 to 2024, with Trump winning the region outright. And the downballot Republican vote continued along an upward trajectory in that time.
Just as it took a while for the South to realign—voting for Republican presidential candidates while also splitting their ticket for Democrats downballot—so too can we expect the current Realignment to feature some level of “downballot lag” as voters adjust to voting for their new party at all levels.
You can find these insights and more in this year’s edition of the Split Ticket Atlas. Download it here.
I'm just a lowly subscriber :), but from a data display perspective I'd like to _also_ see a second column showing normalized ("percentage") overperformance per county (either normalized to total votes per county or some sort of mean* number of Republican votes in the relevant election).
* quick and dirty just the mean of the POTUS and Senate votes.