In 2021, John Dickerson tweeted about the modern rarity of what I call “split ticket senators” (e.g., a Republican senator elected in the same year their state voted for a Democrat for president), which I found interesting. I wanted to further explore the concept, which started out by using more data to look at the trend over time [see below].

I never ended up going further with the project, but here are some of my open questions:

• Where does these kind of split-ticket wins occur? Always swing states?
• Is there anything that the polling in those states indicates → did the senate candidate have an up-ticket effect for presidential race?

Update from 11/09/2024: Now that the 2024 Election is largely wrapped, I decided to revisit this question and see how many “split ticket senators” occurred this most recent election. As of today, there are 4 states that had “split ticket senators”, all of which went R for President and D for Senator: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin. This assumes Arizona stays as a D win (for Gallego over Lake) and Pennsylvania stays as a R win (for McCormick over Casey).

So surprisingly, a sizable increase in the number from 2020, though still down from the typical counts we use to see pre-2016.