Most trends from 2020 are solidified even if "Trump isn’t on the ballot," i.e., you’re not going to see states like IA become competitive-ish again (the idea that Trump had some unique appeal/popularity in this state or that it wasn’t already on track to become a reliably red state pre-Trump has always been one of the most ludicrous takes) or the RGV/South TX (including most of the urban parts of it) swing/trend D due to some "incumbency bias." You’re also not going to see some dramatic R rebound in the suburbs*, particularly in the South — GA is a serious uphill battle and probably doesn’t flip barring a complete D collapse nationally. There will be two or three notable exceptions like New England, which I think is primed to trend R in 2024 — I don’t consider those margins that we saw in ME/VT the new normal, and there’s a case to be made that Biden outperformed substantially among particular groups in that region in a way that will be hard to replicate as the incumbent (Catholics, non-college-educated but culturally more 'moderate' voters, rural/small-town men, people repelled by Trump governing like a generic R, etc.).
*I will say that I’m not sold on R gains in Milwaukee/WO(W) being a more probable outcome than R gains in the Philadelphia area/Delaware Valley or the former being inherently less likely to trend D post-Trump than the latter. It’s also part of why I don’t expect PA/WI to vote more than a point apart in 2022.
As for the Senate, I think Sherrod Brown is more likely to lose than Jon Tester and that he won’t outperform Biden/Harris by more than 3-4 points. I also believe Debbie Stabenow running again in MI makes that seat more likely to flip than it would be without her (could see her losing while a few Democrats considered more vulnerable narrowly hang on). Brown losing by more than the D nominee in TX is not out of the question and probably even somewhat likely.
Who do you think Stabenow is more vulnerable than another Democrat would be? She did take her race for granted in 2018 and her campaign skills seem to have slackened from when she won her first race against Spencer Abraham in 2000. And how much do you think Brown is going to lose by? What about Tester, after what happened to Bullock last year?
