We live in straight-ticket America. The numbers, though still incomplete (especially from New York, New Jersey, and California) tell the story. I’ve added up the current returns from the four major regions of the country (including, contrary to Census Bureau definitions, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. in the East) for president and for the House of Representatives. The table gives the percentages, as rounded-off integers, first for Republicans and then for Democrats nationally and in each region.
| Region | President | House |
| USA | 47-51 | 48-50 |
| East | 41-57 | 40-58 |
| Midwest | 50-48 | 51-47 |
| West | 40-57 | 55-44 |
| South | 54-45 | 55-44 |
The reader will note that there’s not much difference. The only percentages that are more than 1 percent different are the Democratic presidential and congressional percentages in the West, and that’s just the result of rounding (if you go out to tenths, they’re 1.4 percent apart).
However, you might wonder whether these similarities are just the result of bigger differences being rounded off. That’s not right either. I calculated the current (Nov. 13) percentages for president, senator, congressman, and governor in each of the 21 states that cast more than 3 million votes. This includes every state with eight or more congressional districts plus Colorado, which has seven.
The following table shows the Republican percentages for each office in each of these states, sorted by regions. (Showing the Democratic percentages would not have made any significant difference in illustrating the point; showing both parties’ percentages would have produced a lot of clutter and distraction for the reader.) I have put numbers in boldface where the Republican candidates are winning more votes than the Democratic candidates.
| State | President | Senate | House | Governor |
| NY | 43 | 42 | ||
| PA | 49 | 51 | ||
| NJ | 41 | 41 | ||
| MA | 33 | 18 | ||
| IL | 41 | 39 | 42 | |
| OH | 53 | 57 | ||
| MI | 48 | 48 | 50 | |
| WI | 49 | 51 | ||
| MN | 45 | 44 | 46 | |
| MO | 57 | 58 | 57 | |
| IN | 57 | 58 | 56 | |
| CA | 34 | 34 | ||
| WA | 39 | 39 | 43 | |
| AZ | 49 | 49 | 50 | |
| CO | 42 | 44 | 44 | |
| TX | 52 | 54 | 54 | |
| FL | 51 | 52 | ||
| NC | 50 | 49 | 49 | 47 |
| GA | 49 | 50 | 51 | |
| VA | 44 | 44 | 47 | |
| TN | 60 | 62 | 59 |
The biggest difference came in Massachusetts, where there were no Republican candidates in two of the nine congressional districts. Note that even well-known senators running against little-known opponents, such as Mark Warner and John Cornyn, did not run substantially ahead of their respective parties’ presidential candidates.
The most significant finding in my view is that Republican candidates won the popular vote for the House in states that President Trump lost or that he carried by very narrow margins: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. (Republicans lost the House popular vote narrowly in North Carolina, only because they had no candidate in the heavily Democratic, predominantly black 12th District.)
If Trump had run just a few votes better in each of these states, and matched the showings of House candidates, he would now be leading in states with 305 electoral votes — one less than he won in 2016 (the difference being accounted for by the single electoral vote of Nebraska 2). So we’re in a straight-ticket America, but one so closely divided that just a few votes in strategic locations can switch 100 electoral votes and vastly alter the balance of forces in both houses of Congress.
The bottom line is that Republicans definitely remain competitive with Democrats, despite losing the popular vote for president by a 3.4 point margin, even amid the fierce hostility of most of the media, even during a pandemic, even after their chances have been underestimated and ridiculed by almost every credentialed expert.
