Morning Distribution for Monday, December 19, 2022

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Monday, December 19, 2022 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [Election Rally in Philadelphia]( [The Voters Who Helped Democrats Keep the Senate]( By [Geoffrey Skelley]( Coming into the 2022 midterm elections, the Democratic Party wasn’t sure what to do with its standard-bearer. With [his poor approval rating]( President Biden [wasn’t a hot commodity]( on the campaign trail, as Democrats — facing an electoral environment that [history suggested]( would be unfavorable — [feared losing both chambers]( of Congress. But after all the votes were tallied, Democrats retained control of the Senate by winning the chamber’s four most important races, holding onto seats in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and picking up an open seat in Pennsylvania. The candidates who won these races didn’t do so by remaking the Democratic coalition in their states. In fact, county-level data suggests that their performances mostly tracked along Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election, which saw him [carry all four states by narrow margins](. [Scatterplot showing the margins of the 2020 presidential election and 2022 Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Each state’s counties are represented by bubbles of one color, sized according to the share of the statewide vote they represented. All bubbles are close to the line representing the same margin in both sets of races, but most are slightly above, indicated a slight overperformance by the Democratic Senate candidate relative to President Biden.][Scatterplot showing the margins of the 2020 presidential election and 2022 Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Each state’s counties are represented by bubbles of one color, sized according to the share of the statewide vote they represented. All bubbles are close to the line representing the same margin in both sets of races, but most are slightly above, indicated a slight overperformance by the Democratic Senate candidate relative to President Biden.] Where these Democratic candidates did gain ground suggests that they largely replicated Biden’s coalition while also making some small but specific inroads. In Pennsylvania counties with lots of white voters without a college degree, in some heavily Hispanic parts of Arizona, in the Atlanta metropolitan area in Georgia — Democrats won Senate seats by exceeding the margins Biden used to win each state in 2020. And even in Nevada, where Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s margin of victory was smaller than Biden’s, her performance in more affluent areas with larger numbers of white voters with a college degree suggests that she made up enough ground to offset her slightly smaller margins in lower-turnout and more racially diverse areas. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: Is There A Political Realignment Among Latino Voters?]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.