Who were the strongest Senate and House candidates of 2024?

These days, so many Senate and House races are over before they begin. Because congressional election results track so closely with presidential election results, Democratic candidates almost always win in blue seats and Republican candidates almost always win in red ones.

But every so often there are exceptional candidates who defy political gravity — those with a strong enough personal brand that they convince a significant number of voters from the opposite party to support them. On the other hand, there are some candidates who are so flawed that they perform significantly worse than a member of their party "should" considering the partisanship of their state or district.

So who distinguished themselves at the ballot box in 2024, and who turned in an uninspired performance? With the help of a new dataset, I dove into last year's election results to find out.

The strongest and weakest Senate candidates

The simplest way to assess the strength and weakness of candidates for Congress is to compare their performances to a consistent baseline measurement of partisanship. Thankfully, we have one: President-elect Donald Trump's and Vice President Kamala Harris's performances in each congressperson's state or district.

For instance, if a Republican won a Senate election by 15 percentage points in a state Trump carried by just 2 points, that's a pretty strong candidate — stronger, say, than a Republican Senate candidate who won by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 25 points. Despite that second candidate's wider margin of victory, they likely had some flaw that caused them to run behind their party's standard-bearer.

Alternatively, maybe they faced a particularly strong Democratic opponent. Unfortunately, there is no objective way to tell whether a particularly large gap between presidential and congressional performance is due more to one candidate's strength or to the other candidate's weakness — although it's often subjectively obvious, as in the first example below.

Without further ado, then, here are almost* all the 2024 Senate races sorted by the difference between their results and the results of the presidential election in their states.

The biggest gap was in Maryland, where Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks defeated Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan by 12 points in a state Harris carried by 29 points. This probably is more about Hogan being a strong candidate than Alsobrooks being a weak one. Despite Maryland's blue hue, the moderate Hogan was elected governor twice and exited office with a 77 percent approval rating, so he has a demonstrated track record of doing better than a typical Republican. That makes Hogan the strongest Senate candidate of 2024.

Honorable mentions go to two Democrats, former Sen. Jon Tester and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Although Tester lost one of the most pivotal Senate elections of the year by 7 points, that was still 13 points better than Harris did in his home state of Montana. And Klobuchar won reelection by 16 points in Minnesota, which Harris carried by only 4 points. She, too, has a long track record of running up the score in her elections — but in this case, she may have also gotten an assist from Republican nominee Royce White, whose offensive statements and controversial beliefs probably made him a weaker-than-average candidate.

One general trend here is that Democratic Senate candidates tended to punch above their weight. Democrats outperformed Harris in 23 of the 32 races in the table, helping them to win Senate races in four states that Trump carried: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. A big reason for this is probably that Democrats had more incumbents running for reelection than Republicans did (15 to 8), and, while incumbency advantage isn't what it used to be, it's still not nothing.

Even accounting for this, though, Democrats had stronger incumbents than Republicans did: 10 Democratic senators outran Harris by more than 3 points, while only two Republican senators (John Barrasso and Pete Ricketts) outran Trump by more than that amount. In fact, three Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Kevin Cramer) did more than 3 points worse than Trump. On the Democratic side, only Sen. Elizabeth Warren did significantly worse than Harris.

The strongest and weakest House candidates

It's easy to do this exercise for Senate candidates because we know exactly how Trump and Harris performed on the state level. But for House candidates, it's harder: Unfortunately, there is no official source for the results of the presidential election on the congressional district level in most states.

Thankfully, though, elections analyst Drew Savicki has spearheaded a crowdsourced effort to calculate them. Thanks to their work, we have unofficial results for the presidential election in 434 of the 435 House districts.** Here, then, are most*** of the 2024 House races sorted by the difference between their margins and the presidential margins in their districts.

And the 2024 Collin Peterson Award for strongest House candidate goes to … Rep. Ed Case of Hawaii, who won reelection by 44 points even though Harris was carrying his district by "only" 25 points. Case isn't exactly a household name, but he is known on Capitol Hill for one thing: being moderate. According to one common measure of congressional ideology, his voting record is more conservative than 96 percent of the Democratic caucus.

Indeed, being moderate has long been a really good way to win over a significant share of the other party's voters. When I did this exercise after the 2020 election, moderate incumbents dominated the top of the list too, and a lot of those same people — Case, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, Democratic Rep. Jared Golden — continued to show up this year. Several other moderates cracked the top 25 overperformers too, like Republican Rep. Mike Turner, Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan and Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola. (That will cheer Democrats who hope Peltola runs for Senate in 2026 — the numbers say she'd be a strong candidate.)

But there are plenty of non-moderates who punched significantly above their weight too, such as Reps. Grace Meng, Rob Menendez, Chuy García, Juan Vargas and Sylvia Garcia. These overperformers have something to tell us about a relatively recent phenomenon in American politics: the inroads Trump has made with people of color. All of those congresspeople are Hispanic or Asian American Democrats representing districts that are majority-Hispanic or plurality-Asian American and voted more strongly for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020. However, these incumbents were able to hold onto most of those voters, perhaps because of their coethnic ties with their constituents.

Even more so than in the Senate, the vast majority of strong overperformers in the House were incumbents — 17 of the top 19. But the two exceptions are interesting. The first is Rep. Mike Kennedy of Utah, who was the second-strongest Republican performer, posting a margin 13 points better than Trump. Kennedy is a hardline conservative in the mold of Sen. Mike Lee, so it's interesting that he got so much crossover support. But this may just be a Utah thing — the strait-laced Beehive State has always been skeptical of Trump and his personal baggage, preferring traditional Republicans like former Sen. Mitt Romney. Indeed, Utah's three other Republican representatives performed 3, 7 and 11 points better than Trump as well.

Finally, Dalia al-Aqidi, the Republican candidate in Minnesota's 5th District, performed an impressive 12 points better than Trump. But this is an instance where her "strength" is probably more about the weakness of her opponent: Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar. It hasn't cost her reelection in her deep-blue district, but Omar is a chronic underperformer in general elections. This is likely due to some combination of the personal and financial scandals that have swirled around her and her unpopular left-wing views (she is nationally notorious as one of the founding members of "the Squad"). It turns out, just as being moderate can help a candidate win votes, being radical can lose them; for example, right-wing firebrands Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and former Rep. Matt Gaetz also ran significantly behind Trump in their districts. Prominent progressives like Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Summer Lee underperformed as well, although, notably, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually did 7 points better than Harris.

Footnotes

*I excluded two races because they didn't feature reasonably direct matchups between a Democrat and a Republican, making a comparison to the Trump-Harris margin difficult. The two were Maine's, where liberal independent Sen. Angus King bogarted a lot of Democratic support, and the regularly scheduled Senate election in Nebraska, in which Democrats did not field a candidate. I did include Vermont's Senate race, with Sen. Bernie Sanders counted as the Democratic candidate (he won the Democratic nomination but chose to run as an independent instead).

**All but New York's 21st District. While we can be quite confident that Trump carried the district, we don't know by how much because not every county in New York has released precinct-level results. In addition, Savicki's data is preliminary in some states, such as North Carolina, where absentee and early votes haven't been allocated to specific precincts.

***I excluded any race that was uncontested by one of the two major parties as well as Louisiana's jungle primaries, since they feature multiple candidates of the same party on the same ballot. However, I included Alaska's House race even though former Rep. Mary Peltola shared the ballot with fellow Democrat Eric Hafner. In practice, Hafner was a minor candidate (receiving just 1 percent of the initial vote), so I decided to treat him like a third-party candidate in order to get a good read on Peltola's strength. For that race — and for Maine's 2nd District — I used the results of the first round of voting, not any of the instant runoffs.