The Senate, Governor and House Races That Were Over Before the Polls Closed
Most midterm races are decided by a few points. A handful are decided long before anyone votes.
I went through the midterm Senate and governor races since 1970, plus every House race since 1978, kept only the ones where both a Democrat and a Republican were on the ballot, and ranked them by margin of victory.
The biggest Senate blowout in that stretch was 69.8 points. The biggest for governor was 68.4. In the House, a Chicago congressman once took 97.3 percent of the vote against a Republican opponent.
Go back further and the numbers get even more extreme, for a reason that has very little to do with the candidates. Here are the records, and how a real race turns into a rout.
The Biggest Blowouts in Midterm Election History
Every race below had a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. Some of them were still over by 60, 70 and 90 points.
Contested midterm races only: a Democrat and a Republican both on the general-election ballot. Margin is the winner's share minus the runner-up's, in points. Certified results from the FEC and the Clerk of the House.
A race only counts if both a Democratic and a Republican nominee were on the general-election ballot. That rules out the races where one party didn't bother to run anyone, which happen every cycle and would otherwise fill the whole list with 100-to-nothing results. In New York, where candidates can run on several party lines, a candidate endorsed by both the Democrats and the Republicans doesn't count either.
The margin is the winner's share minus the runner-up's. The main rankings start in 1970 for the Senate and governors, and in 1978 for the House, where complete district-level returns begin. The older records get their own section further down, because they belong to a different kind of politics.
The Senate: a primary that mattered more than November
The biggest contested Senate blowout since 1970 came in Arkansas in 1974. Governor Dale Bumpers had already done the hard part in the Democratic primary, where he ended the 30-year Senate career of J. William Fulbright, 65% to 35%. The general election was an afterthought. Bumpers took 84.9% against Republican John H. Jones and won by 69.8 points.
The 2000s produced two of the next three. In Nebraska in 2002, Chuck Hagel faced Charlie Matulka, a construction worker who had won the Democratic primary over a perennial candidate. Hagel won by 68.1. The same year in Alaska, Ted Stevens beat Frank Vondersaar, another frequent candidate, by 67.7, with the Green Party taking more than 7%.
The common thread is simple. A popular incumbent, or a governor moving up, meets an opponent the other party never seriously recruited. In Washington in 1970, Republicans struggled to recruit anyone against Henry Jackson, a Democrat on good terms with the Nixon White House, and eventually settled on state senator Charles Elicker. In North Dakota in 2010, Heidi Heitkamp and Ed Schultz both passed on the race against Governor John Hoeven, who went on to win by 53.9 points.
Governors: Wallace, Schaefer and Wyoming
Contested midterm races only. Certified results from state election offices.
Alabama, 1974. George Wallace's first campaign after he was shot in 1972 was the biggest contested governor's blowout of the modern era. He took 83.2% and carried every county, the last candidate for Alabama governor to do that.
Maryland, 1986. Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaefer won 82.4%, the largest share ever in a contested statewide race in Maryland: 907,291 votes to 194,185.
Wyoming, 2022. The only race from the last 20 years in the governor top five. Mark Gordon won by 58.3 points, and Democrat Theresa Livingston's 15.8% was the lowest share for a Wyoming Democratic nominee since statehood. About 6% of voters wrote in a name instead, after a write-in campaign for Brent Bien, who had lost the Republican primary.
Nevada in 1974 shows how a third candidate can widen the gap. Mike O'Callaghan won 67.4%, and the Independent American Party candidate took 15.5%, almost as much as the Republican.
Sometimes the other party's campaign falls apart before it starts. In Nebraska in 2010, the Democratic nominee for governor withdrew in July over falsified campaign-finance reports. His replacement lost to Dave Heineman by 47.8 points.
The House: one seat in the Bronx
Contested midterm races only. Nos. 3 and 4 are tied to the first decimal. District returns from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, which compiles the Clerk of the House statistics, checked against state results.
House districts can be drawn so tightly around one party's voters that the result is never in doubt, and the numbers show it. The top contested House blowout came in Chicago in 1982, when Harold Washington took 97.3% against Republican Taliaferro. A few months later Washington was elected mayor of Chicago.
But the name that keeps showing up is Jose Serrano. His Bronx seat was renumbered twice through redistricting, and it produced the biggest contested midterm blowout in the House in six of the twelve midterms from 1978 to 2022. Five of the ten races above are his, and a sixth, Robert Garcia's in 1986, came from the same seat before Serrano held it. Harlem, Brooklyn, Chicago's South Side, Philadelphia and Detroit fill most of the rest of the top 20.
The one rural seat in the House top ten is Alabama's 7th in 1978, an open seat won by Richard Shelby, then a Democrat. He switched to the Republican Party in 1994. His runner-up that year was a Conservative Party candidate, and the Republican took 2.2%.
The biggest contested Republican blowout in the House in that period was Bobby Jindal's re-election in Louisiana's 1st District in 2006: 88.1% against 7.4% for Democrat David Gereighty, a margin of 80.7. No other Republican cracks the top 40.
These are the contested ones. Plenty of House seats don't get that far. In 2018, 41 House races had only one major party on the ballot. In 2022 it was 35, according to Ballotpedia.
The Solid South: contested, on paper
Before 1970, the records belong almost entirely to the old one-party South. In states like South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, the Democratic primary was the real election. The Republican nominee in November was a name on the ballot and little else.
Each of these had a Republican nominee on the ballot. Figures from state election reports and the Clerk of the House.
The extreme case is South Carolina in 1938. Burnet Maybank won the governor's race with 49,009 votes. The Republican, Tolbert, got 283. That is a margin of 98.9 points, and the low vote total tells you how little the general election mattered. The Democratic primary that summer drew about 336,000 voters in its first round, nearly seven times as many as the general election.
It isn't a handful of oddities, either. By my count from the published results, close to 40 of the 50 biggest contested midterm governor blowouts on record came in Southern states, most of them before 1950. The biggest contested midterm Senate blowouts on record all come from the one-party South between 1918 and 1954. That is why I kept them out of the main rankings: they measure the strength of a one-party system more than anything about the candidates.
The most votes ever
Blowouts are about margins. The raw vote record goes to the biggest state:
How a real race turns into a rout
Look at the modern-era lists and the same few causes come up again and again.
The real contest was the primary. Bumpers beat Fulbright in May 1974. In Alabama and Georgia in the 1970s, Wallace and George Busbee had effectively won once the Democratic primary was over.
The other party never found a candidate. Matulka, Vondersaar, Elicker and a long list of others were nominees nobody had recruited. When the strongest names pass, the nomination goes to whoever files.
The campaign collapsed. Nebraska's 2010 Democratic nominee withdrew. In Vermont in 1998, Republican nominee Fred Tuttle, a dairy farmer who had starred in a mock documentary about running for office, beat a self-funding candidate in the primary and then endorsed his Democratic opponent, Patrick Leahy. Leahy won by nearly 50 points.
The map did the work. In the House, districts like Serrano's are drawn around one party's voters, and the result is set before the campaign starts.
Since 1970, the biggest contested midterm blowout is 69.8 points in the Senate, 68.4 for governor and 94.6 in the House. Most of the big ones share a cause: the losing party either fought its real battle in the primary or never fought at all.
Go back further and the margins climb into the 90s, but those numbers say more about the one-party South than about any one campaign.
Sources: Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections compilations of certified results (1982 to 2022); Clerk of the House, Statistics of the Congressional Election; state election offices, including the Maryland State Board of Elections, Wyoming Secretary of State, Tennessee Secretary of State and California Secretary of State; MIT Election Data and Science Lab, U.S. House returns 1976 to 2022; South Carolina Secretary of State, Supplemental Report (1939); Heard and Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections; Ballotpedia (2023).
Filed under: General Knowledge
