WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s second impeachment procedure followed a very predictably biased path in the US Senate last week, with Democrats voting to convict and most Republicans voting to acquit. There is a long list of reasons behind that outage, but one of them is the increasingly neat alignment between the Senate and the presidential partisans’ cards.
Many states used to have divided Senate delegations, and presidents won the vote in states represented by the opposing party in the upper chamber of Congress. But that pattern has been declining for decades. And it’s gotten so far that today, in 2021, the presidential election and senate maps are remarkably similar.
You can get a sense of the change by going back to 1993, when President Bill Clinton came to Washington after 12 years of Republicans in the White House. Clinton won 32 states in the 1992 election, and those states had a lot of partisan diversity in the Senate.
Just under half of the states he won, fifteen, were represented by fully democratic delegations. Three of the states he won were represented by all-Republican delegations. And nearly half, 14, were represented by split-off delegations: a Democrat and a Republican.
In those Republican and split states, that meant opposing senators were answering voters who had also just elected a Democrat to the White House. There was an impulse to try to work together – or at least pretend to work together.
In addition, there were three states with Democratic Senate delegations that did not vote for Clinton. The point is, the partisan line was blurred back then, but has become much clearer in the years since.
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, he was carrying 28 states, and there was a noticeable increase in that coalition of states’ partiality in the Senate.
Two thirds of the states Obama won, 19 of them, were represented by two Democrats in the Senate. A state that voted for Obama, Maine, was represented by two Republicans. And eight of the states that voted for him were represented by delegations in two parts.
In addition, there were four states with Democratic Senate delegations that did not vote for Obama. Those states – Arkansas, West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota – were on track to hire a more Republican cast. Six of those states’ eight senators are now Republican.
The net effect was that Obama had to lean more heavily on a purely democratic group of senators. He simply had less electoral influence over Republican and split delegations.
But those numbers still look relatively twofold compared to where we are in 2021. The 2020 presidential results align almost perfectly with the bias of current Senate delegations.
President Joe Biden won 25 states on his way to the White House and 22 of them have delegations from the Democratic Senate. The other three are from States with split delegations. No one is from states with Republican delegations.
That likely limits the power of Biden’s presidential pulpit to influence the other side in the Senate. It also suggests some of the reasons we saw such loyalty to former President Donald Trump in last week’s impeachment process. The vast majority of Senate Republicans – all but three – come from states that voted for Trump.
One thing you’ll notice when you look at all the numbers here is that Democrats’ victories in Republican states have shrunk significantly and consistently since Bill Clinton. Part of this has to do with shifts in the politics of those states. For example, it seems remarkable that in 1993 Oregon had two Republican senators (or Alabama had two Democrats).
But the other sharp drop in this data comes in the winning states of these split-delegation presidents. And that has not so much to do with the fact that these presidents can appeal to “split states”, as with the fact that there are simply not many states with split delegations anymore. Delegations from the split Senate have become an endangered species in US politics.
In 1993, Clinton’s first term in office, nearly half the states in the country had split delegations. According to George W. Bush’s first term, the number was 14. It was 13 states for Obama’s first term and 12 for Donald Trump’s term. Currently, there are only half a dozen states with split Senate delegations.
That means that when a new president arrives in town and hopes to set an agenda, he will immediately face a senate where the partisan divisions are stark and where there is likely little motivation to compromise. It also means that you’re more likely to get the very biased narrative we saw in the impeachment process over the past week.
To be clear, this does not mean that the behavior that currently characterizes the Senate is “wise” or “good for politics,” nor is it irrational given the divisions in the country. For the past 30 years, voters have spoken, and they have created a very partisan body on Capitol Hill.