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We can see now how bad the trend is for Democrats. While, at their best, they could have won the Senate while losing a hypothetical Senate popular vote in 2008, our model suggests the party would have needed to win nationally by 4.2 points in 2024 in order to be favored to win 51 Senate seats. For context, that's 5.7 points better than they did in the presidential popular vote. Moreover, if we run the 2024 election again but remove Democrats' incumbency advantages in the states where they lost seats (Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia), while adjusting the value of incumbency in places they held (such as Arizona, where Democrat Ruben Gallego beat Trump's margin in the state by nearly 8 percentage points) — the template for the Democrats going forward — our model indicates they'd need to win the national popular vote by 6.1 points in order to be favored to win 51 seats.

As we can see, the benefit incumbency confers onto candidates is especially important to Democrats. This is because they hold Senate seats in those six states that currently lean to the right of the nation as a whole. Without incumbents in those seats, and assuming a neutral political environment, Democrats would be expected to lose six more Senate seats. Worse, losing those incumbents hits Democrats harder than it would hit Republicans to lose theirs, since Democrats rely more on Trump voters crossing over to support them in order to win seats.

Of course, long-term trends are hard to forecast, and this exercise is best suited for short-term analysis. Maybe by 2034 Democrats will have improved materially in, say, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia such that their disadvantage has disappeared. But what the party really needs is to figure out how its candidates in deep-red states can distance themselves from the national Democratic Party brand — or to change the national brand altogether. Without that, it will be hard for the party to win enough Senate seats to confirm (or block) judges and Cabinet nominees and effect major legislative change for the foreseeable future.

Footnotes

*Specifically, an average of the state's lean relative to the nation that gives 75 percent weight to the 2024 election result and 25 percent weight to the 2020 election result.

**I calculated each state's population density by first dividing the number of people living in each county in the state by the county's area in square miles. Then, I took the natural logarithm of that number. Finally, I calculated the average of each state's county population density weighted by the number of people living in each county.

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