Senate candidate quality, as compared to the national environment

Another context worth keeping in mind is the national one -- that all these candidates were running in a year when the national popular vote appears to have shifted from favoring Democrats to favoring Republicans.

In 2020, Democrats won the House of Representatives popular vote by 3 percentage points. This year, Republicans are currently leading it by 4.5 points, though that margin will shrink as California tallies more votes. We don't know what the final number will be, but let's be conservative and assume the national environment shifted four points in favor of Republicans, as compared to 2020.

With that baseline, every Republican in a competitive Senate race underperformed because no one managed to improve on Trump's margin by four points. (Budd in North Carolina, who improved the most, only did so by 2.2 percentage points.)

Yet that doesn't necessarily mean all the GOP nominees were bad candidates. Perhaps it points to a broader problem with the party's brand that made voters in all these states hesitant to grant that party control of the Senate. Then, perhaps, some candidates did better than others in dealing with that constraint.

Senate candidate quality, as compared to GOP governor nominees

Still, a national popular vote shift might be a misleading baseline because there were some very different trends in different states. In particular, Republicans sharply improved in New York and Florida, two populous states that affect the nationwide vote count significantly, but the GOP made more limited gains elsewhere.

So another potentially useful comparison is to check how Republican Senate candidates in competitive races did compared to their own party's governor nominees in 2022.

Here we see that in five of these seven contests with a governor's race on the ballot (there was none in North Carolina), the GOP's Senate candidates did worse.