The 2016 Senate elections were the most nationalized ever.
The amount of straight-ticket voting was unusual even for the highly polarized era we live in. Four years ago, for example, Democratic Senate candidates won in some states where President Obama lost by healthy margins, including Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. Republicans, meanwhile, held their seat in Nevada even though Mitt Romney lost there by 7 percentage points.
Nothing like that happened this year. Instead, one of the clearest trends in recent American politics growing polarization and partisanship accelerated. Most voters have sorted themselves into two camps: liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. This trend is apparent up and down the ballot to a degree that weve never seen before.
Indeed, this is the first time that all the states (with Senate races on the ballot) have voted for the same party in both the presidential and Senate races. Senators were first popularly elected in 1914, and the next presidential election took place two years later, in 1916. So thats 100 years and 26 presidential election cycles in all. Youd have to go back to 1920 to come even close to seeing anything like it. In that election, the only state that didnt vote for the same party in the presidential and Senate race was Kentucky. It chose Republican Richard Ernst for Senate by less than 1 percentage point and Democrat James Cox for president, also by less than 1 point.
