The Rationalization of the United States Senate

There's an interesting thing about the Democratic Senators who were defeated for re-election last night, or who retired and saw their seats taken by Republicans: they were almost exclusively from red states. Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Mark Begich of Alaska. Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Max Baucus of Montana. Only two came from "purple" swing states, namely Tom Harkin of Iowa and Mark Udall of Colorado, and in Colorado's case it has only recently started swinging. The result is that the losses tended to be concentrated among the more moderate Democrats, and therefore the Senate Democratic caucus which remains is more ideologically consistent than the current one.

Consider the following maps. First, here's the Senate on the eve of the 2006 elections:

Now here's what the Senate will look like next January:

That second map looks a lot more like your average Presidential election, doesn't it? Note that these Senates have similar numbers of Democrats, 45 in 2005 and 46 in 2015 (probably). But we've gained one net Democrat in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon, plus two new ones in Virginia and a gain in Missouri that's kind of anomalous for these purposes. We've lost, on the other hand, Democrats from Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa, along with anomalous losses in Wisconsin and Illinois and the loss of both seats in Arkansas. Almost all of that has had the effect of lining the two parties up better with the real political/cultural dividing-lines in the country.



And in 2016, the Democrats will have pick-up opportunities that are mostly on the Democratic side of this line. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire are probably their best chances to gain seats. Those four would give us a 50/50 Senate that would basically be blue states in blue, purple states in purple, and red states in red. Really the only exceptions would be that Republicans would have a Senator from Maine and that Democrats would have Senators from West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota. (Arguably Indiana is also an anomaly, but since Obama did win it one time it's hard to deny it its place among the vaguely purple-ish states at least.) Perhaps Democrats might also deserve one of North Carolina's two seats given that they have been competitive there of late, but Richard Burr should be somewhat vulnerable as well so that could happen. It's not impossible that Iowa will be competitive, or that Democrats could manage to take the second seat in Ohio. All of this would be entirely consistent with the basic geography of American politics.

And what all of this means, I think, is that if Democrats have a 2016 that's as fun as it should be, their restored majority caucus should be a lot more ideologically cohesive than their current one. So even though it will probably be smaller, say in the 51-53 range instead of the expiring 55, the median Senator may not have gotten much more conservative, and might even have moved somewhat to the left.

Of course, until then we have a median Senator who comes from the interior of an extremely cohesive Republican caucus, but it's not like the next two years were gonna be big ones for legislation anyway.