WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s second indictment last week followed a very predictable biased path in the U.S. Senate, with the Democrats acquitted and most Republicans voting in favor. There is a long list of reasons behind the exposition, but one of them is the increasingly neat connection between the Senate and the presidential party cards.
It was earlier that many states had divided delegations of the Senate, and that presidents got the vote in states represented by the opposing party in the upper chamber of Congress. But this pattern has been declining for decades now. And it has progressed to this day, in 2021, the presidential election and the Senate cards look 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 as Republicans in the White House. Clinton won 32 states in the 1992 election and those states had a lot of biased diversity in the Senate.
Just under half of the 15 countries he won were represented by fully-fledged Democratic delegations. Three of the states he won were represented by full Republican delegations. And nearly half, 14, were represented by divided delegations: one Democrat and one Republican.
In those Republican and split states, this meant that the senators of the opposing party responded to voters who had just elected a Democrat in the White House. There was an impulse to try to reach out to work together – or, at least, to work together.
In addition, there were three states with Democratic Senate delegations that did not vote for Clinton. The point is that the biased line was fuller at the time, but it became much clearer in the years that followed.
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, he ran 28 states and there was a marked increase in the bias of that coalition of states in the Senate.
Two-thirds of the states Obama won, 19 of them, were represented by two Democrats in the Senate. One state that voted for Obama, Maine, was represented by two Republicans. And eight of the states that voted for him were represented by divided delegations.
In addition, there were four states with Democratic Senate delegations that did not vote for Obama. These states – Arkansas, West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota – were on track to tackle a more Republican cast. Six of the states’ eight senators are now Republicans.
The net impact was that Obama had to rely more heavily on purely Democratic group of senators. He simply had fewer elections over Republicans and divided delegations.
But the numbers seem rather twofold compared to our position in 2021. The presidential results in 2020 are almost perfectly in line with the bias of the current Senate delegations.
President Joe Biden has won 25 states en route to the White House and 22 of them have Democratic Senate delegations. The other three come from states with split delegations. No one comes from states with Republican delegations.
This is likely to limit the power of Biden’s presidential bullying chair to swing the other side in the Senate. It also points to some of the reasons why we saw such loyalty to former President Donald Trump in the indictment last week. The vast majority of Senate Republicans – all but three – come from states that voted for Trump.
One thing you notice when you look at all the numbers here is that Democratic victories in Republican states have shrunk significantly and consistently since Bill Clinton. Some of this has to do with shifts in the politics of those states. It seems remarkable, for example, that Oregon had two Republican senators in 1993 (or that Alabama had two Democrats).
But the other sharp decline in this data is that these presidents are winning states with split delegations. And it has less to do with the fact that these presidents can appeal to ‘split states’ than with the fact that there are simply not many states with split delegations anymore. Split senate delegations have become an endangered species in American politics.
In 1993, Clinton’s first term, nearly half of the states in the country, had split delegations. According to George W. Bush’s first term, it was 14. That was 13 states for Obama’s first term and 12 for Donald Trump. Currently, there are only half a dozen states with split senate delegations.
This means that when a new president arrives in the city and hopes to set an agenda, he immediately deals with a Senate where the partisan divisions are strong and where there is probably little motivation for compromises. It also means you’re more likely to get the very biased story we saw in the indictment last week.
To be clear, none of this means that the behavior that the Senate is currently defining is ‘wise’ or ‘good for politics’, but neither is it irrational, given the divisions that run through the country. For the past 30 years, voters have spoken out, and they have created a deeply biased body on Capitol Hill.