Nate Cohn for the NYT:

Here’s a figure about the 2022 midterm elections that might surprise you: Republicans won the national House popular vote by three percentage points — 51 percent to 48 percent. They still won by two points after adjusting for races in which only one major party was on the ballot.

Yes, that’s right: Republicans won the popular vote by a clear if modest margin, even as Democrats gained seats in the Senate and came within thousands of votes of holding the House.

If you’re looking to make sense of the 2022 election, the Republican lead in the national vote might just be the missing piece that helps fit a few odd puzzle pieces together.

The national polls, which showed growing Republican strength over the last month of the campaign, were dead-on. On paper, this ought to have meant a good — if not necessarily great — Republican election year.

Imagine, for instance, if the Republicans had run seven points better than Joe Biden’s 2020 showing in every state and district, as they did nationwide. They would have picked up 21 seats in the House, about the number many analysts expected. They also would have easily won the Senate, flipping Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and holding Pennsylvania.

Yet for a variety of reasons, Republicans failed to translate their strength into anything like a clear victory.