Is "downballot lag" dead?

[ProgressiveModerate]

Downballot lag is basically the idea that when a community re-aligns, that re-alignment tends to first occur at the top of the ticket and eventually trickles down to state and local politics. West Virginia is a great example - it's voted Republican Presidentially since 2000, but Democrats were still able to cling on congressionally and at the state level until about 2014/2016, with Republicans flipping the Senate seat this year being the nail in the coffin.

However, this cycle we saw something interesting where in many states overperformances were near-universal. For instance in 2018 in OH, Brown had his most notable overperformances in WWC parts of northeastern OH where Dems like Clinton had recently lost a lot of ground - he actually slightly underran Clinton and Biden in some of the left-shifting suburbs. However, in his re-election bid this cycle, his overperformance across the state was pretty universal - his overperformance in Delaware County wasn't that different from Mahoning.

Is the idea of "downballot lag" dead, and if not why did we see so many "blanket overperformances" this cycle?

[Virginiá]

This is going to be difficult to ascertain without seeing another presidential election play out. Even the midterms might be misleading, as it's not totally uncommon for a party to fail to consolidate gains among certain voter groups in a bad midterm for their party. It's generally a time where the party that controls the White House either stagnates or regresses, while the out party 's favorable trends accelerate. On that note, I feel like Democrats posting great 2026 results could be a bit misleading because of their high-propensity voter coalition. For voter groups they are genuinely losing ground with, they could easily rebound a bit before slipping again in 2028 or beyond.

It's not always clear-cut exactly where these durable inroads are actually being made just off of one election. Just because you win an election doesn't mean every voter group you flipped or gained with is now permanently yours. It wasn't for Bush in 2004, nor Obama in 2008, nor Clinton nor Biden.

Suffice to say, it's really too early to be calling anything dead.

[Spectator]

The NC races also support this theory. The Dems that won the downballot races there did better than Harris everywhere: urban, suburban, and rural, all pretty uniformly.

[Atlas Force]

Like 99% of these kinds of questions it depends on the place really. It’s definitely dead in CA-27 and CA-47

[หมูเด้ง]

The NC races also support this theory. The Dems that won the downballot races there did better than Harris everywhere: urban, suburban, and rural, all pretty uniformly.

That's kind of the reverse of what's being described here. And it wouldn't be the first time it happened this way, either.

Between 2000 to 2024, Colorado went being 9% to the right of the country to being 13% to the left. This 20% started after 2002, when Republicans were solidly in control of Colorado. In 2004, the congressional delegation went from 2-7 to 4-5 in 2004. They flipped the state government in 2006. In 2008, they swept everything outside of the row offices and Obama became the second Democrat to win a majority of the vote there since the New Deal.

Things trickled up in this situation.

The way change happens probably also depends on how that change is being made. In West Virginia, no one really moves there but with Global Warming becoming an important issue and more things like abortion becoming salient, they first started by punishing the national party at first. In Colorado,  it got really Republican after a lot of people from traditional industries (fossil energy, defense) and the "trad movement" (Fundamentalist Christian sects) moved there in the 90s. Then the nature of migration changed to creative class people and Denver and the North Range grew by like 30% in only a few years.

[Talleyrand]

The NC races also support this theory. The Dems that won the downballot races there did better than Harris everywhere: urban, suburban, and rural, all pretty uniformly.

That's kind of the reverse of what's being described here. And it wouldn't be the first time it happened this way, either.

I think Spectator's point was that down-ballot Democrats did "uniformly" better than Harris both in areas trending away and towards them. With down-ballot lag, they'd have performed relatively better in the former group than the latter group instead.

[หมูเด้ง]

The NC races also support this theory. The Dems that won the downballot races there did better than Harris everywhere: urban, suburban, and rural, all pretty uniformly.

That's kind of the reverse of what's being described here. And it wouldn't be the first time it happened this way, either.

I think Spectator's point was that down-ballot Democrats did "uniformly" better than Harris both in areas trending away and towards them. With down-ballot lag, they'd have performed relatively better in the former group than the latter group instead.

Well yeah. There's example going both ways.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I think it is now the only predictive indicator of who wins in presidential years. At least going off of 2020 and 2024.

There's always the caveat that any conventional wisdom now without Trump on the ballot in the future exists in this very nebulous unpredictable place.

[Pericles]

It appears to be a 4-8 year process rather than a multi decade one now. So the Trump trends that started in 2016 have made their way to all levels of government.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

The answer is "it depends", while other times presidential swings are unique to the dynamics of one race and then revert.  I'll look at my home county (Williamson, TN), because I think it's a good example of both.  I'm going to include all statewide/US House races since the last of each type of election before Trump.

Presidential:
2012- R+46
2016- R+35
2020- R+26
2024- R+32

Senatorial:
2014- R+51
2018- R+18 (uniquely competitive statewide)
2020- R+35
2024- R+33

Gubernatorial:
2014- R+67 (Democrats barely contested this race statewide, and Haslam won every county in the state by at least 18 points)
2018- R+32
2022- R+37

House:
2014- R+51
2016- R+51
2018- R+31
2020- R+36
2022- R+35 (now split between two districts)
2024- R+35

We clearly saw a downballot lag in the first half of the results, with ~R+50 Williamson County holding through 2016 downballot, while it jumped down to R+35 at the top of the ticket.  In fact, if I'd expanded it more, you would see R+59 results downballot for 2012.  But, since 2018, it's been murkier.  2018 was a weak year for Republicans, as it was everywhere, though Republicans other than in the Blackburn-Bredesen race managed to keep winning margins in the low-30s.

2020 saw another major presidential swing left (to R+26), but something funny happened.  The non-presidential races swung right, with margins returning to the mid-30s.  Since then, Republican victory margins in Williamson County have been extremely stubborn, with every downballot race between R+33 and R+37 in 2020, 2022, and 2024.  However, in 2024, the presidential results reverted towards the downballot results (and were fractionally away from rounding into that R+33-37 range), rather than the other way around.

[Samof94]

North Carolina seems to be in the early stages of flipping. I think it is likely to have a Democrat win it in 2026 for Senate.

[It's Time.]

No, it’s just coalitions are changing. The new source of “downballot lag” benefitting Ds is Latinos. Look at how people like Raul Ruiz massively overperformed Harris with Latinos, and there’s many others. Downballot lag benefitting Rs also still exists with college-educated whites, look at the PA row offices margins in the Collar counties and in Harrisburg. The overperformance was far bigger there than in the western or northeastern parts of the state.