The Senate Since 1980
by Jonah Furman
Partisanship! Don’t you hate it? Jon Stewart and David Broder do! And so do a lot of other people. But who is actually causing all of this partisanship? We decided to take a look at every Senate race in the United States since 1980, which we are arbitrarily defining as the beginning of the modern political era.
Why the Senate? Well, for one thing, Senate races are statewide elections, meaning their results are unlikely to be skewed by legislative gerrymandering. For another, a full third of the Senate is on the ballot every two years, and the results of those races are a better indicator of a national mood than the quadrennial gubernatorial votes. Finally, there are 435 seats in the House, and that’s just way too many to research.
What did we find? The most partisan states — that is, the states which always vote one way — are split equally between Democrats and Republicans. The most stubbornly red: Idaho, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming; the most adamantly blue: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and… West Virginia?! That’s what the stats say. Now obviously some of this has to do with the Senators themselves — West Virginia was unlikely to go red so long as Robert Byrd was funneling dollars to its many fine roadside rest stops — but that doesn’t fully disguise trends over time: If you count the brief period when Jim Jeffords left the Republican party and gave control to the Democrats, the chamber has changed hands six times in this modern era. That’s considerably more volatility than in the House.
A degree lower in the partisanship hierarchy are those states which have, at least once, since 1980 (which, by the way, is roughly a dozen elections, depending on exact terms and special elections), elected a candidate from their less-favored party. But make no mistake — Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alaska, and the three bet-you-didn’t-know-they-were-red states of Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire, love the Republicans, electing them to the Senate 75%-99% of the time. On the other side are the sticks-in-the-Democratic-mud: California, Illinois, Connecticut, North Dakota, Michigan, Maryland, and the Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Republican Arkansas and Louisiana.
Basically, the only states that can’t be singled out as contributing to whatever vicious partisan cycle our two-party system might engender — or perhaps just the states that can’t make up their collective mind — are Oregon and Iowa on the just-barely GOP side, and Vermont, Colorado, Florida, Ohio and South Dakota barely leaning Democrat. Georgia and Minnesota are the anti-partisan’s wet dream, literally splitting their dozen or so Senate races down the line, 50–50.
For good measure we also examined how voters tend to react to appointees, those replacements who are dispatched to DC when an sitting Senator passes on to the next world (e.g. the Executive Branch). Since Ronald Reagan was elected president, almost none of the appointed Senator of the opposite party of his or her predecessors have achieved reelection. A notable exception: Georgia’s Zell Miller, the Democrat who showed up at the Republican convention in 2004 to fulminate and emit spittle and just basically bark about what a pussy John Kerry was. So maybe there’s less to this than meets the eye. Either way, numbers: you have them!
Jonah Furman is an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Give him a job or else he will stay in school forever and write books on, like, the figuration of dogs in Rilke’s poetics, and nobody wants that.