Unlike in the Maine House, Democrats didn’t manage to add to their numbers, but they could certainly count that as a victory nonetheless: As with the House, Republicans had been hoping to take control of the chamber entirely and at least provide a check on Janet Mills and Augusta Democrats. Instead, the entire election - even with redistricting - was a total wash.
In a sense, the Senate is always far easier to analyze than the House for a number of reasons. There are only 35 districts, not 151, so compiling the data is certainly quite a bit simpler. Every single seat had both a Democrat and a Republican running, so there were no uncontested seats left on the table by either party. Finally, unlike in the House, unenrolled and third-party candidates were almost a complete non-factor: There was only one in the entire state, and he had no impact whatsoever in a safe Republican seat.
So, how what happened? Let’s break it down. First, a look at the statewide popular vote:
We see here that, without non-partisan actors, both parties obviously did better, but Democrats did much better than both Senate Republicans and House Democrats - though they still trailed Janet Mills’ 55.7% in the gubernatorial race. In the Senate, though, the Democrats far-outperformed their share of the statewide popular vote, capturing almost two-thirds of the seats based on just 52.69% of the vote. If the Democrats had matched their share of seats to their share of votes, they’d have just clung on with an 18-17 majority.
They did a much better job punching above their weight than House Democrats, and it’s reflected in that lopsided result. In the five most competitive districts, all of which were decided by less than 1,000 votes, Democrats won four of the five - for the Republicans to get the majority they’d have needed to not only sweep those districts, but also do better in at least one more.
In the Senate, as in the House, a three-point swing in the Republicans’ direction statewide would have been enough to net all five of those seats and give them the majority. That says that a simple change in any of the factors at play in this election - a different gubernatorial candidate, a better ground game, better fundraising, or different timing on certain external events - might have been enough to make the difference locally. As we did in the House recap, though, let’s take a moment to look at turnout.
In the Senate, too, there was quite a spectrum, from the 24,160 total votes cast in District 25 to the 13,238 votes cast in District 21. Both of those were won by Democrats, and neither was particularly competitive. Democrats won four out of the five lowest-turnout districts, while also winning all five of the highest-turnout districts - again reflecting the excellent year they had overall. Here, the disparity in the most competitive districts wasn’t as great from the average turnout that it was in the House - of the five closest seats Democrats won, only two of them (Districts 16 and 8) were noticeably below the statewide average of 19,067 total votes.
We do see a curious factor at play in turnout comparisons between the House and the Senate, though: There were around 667,000 total votes cast in the Senate races, while there were around 664,000 votes cast in the House races. That’s not entirely unexpected, as turnout tends to drop the lower you go down the ballot: fewer people vote in school board races than the presidential race. In the gubernatorial race, there were over 680,000 votes cast, meaning that there were about 13,000 people who simply skipped over the legislative portion of the ballot.
That’s why we can’t presume that the gap between legislative Democrats and Janet Mills is explained away by ticket-splitting: There are always people who show up to the polls but only fill out the top-tier races. There’s no easy answer to plugging that gap, since both parties tend to focus on simply getting voters to show up, rather than making sure they vote in every race. It’s still a turnout problem for Democrats, though, since it says that they need to do a better job of coordination between the top-of-the-ticket candidates and the legislative candidates, emphasizing how important it is that their gubernatorial candidate have a Legislature they can work with.
Even though there may not have been many voters who checked the box for Janet Mills and legislative Republicans, there was clearly a demonstrable enthusiasm gap between her and the rest of her party. While it worked out for Democrats this time, it would have been enormously important if the gubernatorial race had ended up being just a bit closer and the Republicans had taken control of the Legislature. Republican legislative candidates in both chambers got more votes than Paul LePage statewide, but Democratic legislative candidates got far fewer votes than Janet Mills, showing both potential peril for Democrats and potential opportunity for Republicans - if they get their act together.
In a forthcoming post, I’ll take a more detailed look at how Maine Republicans can close that gap in the Senate, flipping five seats and regaining the majority.