The Battle for Control of an Ever-More Partisan
United States Senate
By Brad Todd
30
2016 Issue 3 | THE SCORE
The cable news networks are covering this year ’ s political campaigns wall-to-wall , but the attention scarcely veers away from one race – the highly unusual 2016 White House chase . But as the primaries have ended , campaign donors and analysts are training their sights on the more complicated battle for control of the United States Senate .
Smart observers will view this Senate fight not in terms of a single election , but as the middle of a series of three election cycles that could fundamentally transform the upper chamber of the Congress – making it more polarized , less moderate , with a narrow , but structural , Republican majority .
The wild card in this equation is the potential impact of two remarkably weak presidential tickets in 2016 – with both parties putting up nominees with fewer fans among swing voters than any in history , creating the potential for a landslide in either direction . Should a national , lopsided , wipe-out not happen , this election and the 2018 election to come may complete a process that blows up the Senate ’ s historical dimensions for good .
By self-perception and some actual history , the Senate is the one place in Washington where friendships cross party lines , and there are more like 100 different , single-member political parties instead of just two national parties locked in trench warfare .
That unusual template came partly as a result of split-ticket voting back home .
For most of the last half-century , Southern states sent plenty of Democrats to the Senate even as those voters shifted firmly in the Republican camp at the presidential level , with Northern , otherwise liberal-leaning states , doing the reverse and electing some Republicans to the Senate .
This open-mindedness on the voters ’ part in Senate races routinely yielded a large number of divided delegations , in which the same state ’ s voters sent a Republican and a Democrat to Washington . Those natural bipartisan relationships affected the temperament of the entire chamber .
In the late 1970s , over half the states had split delegations ; today , only 14 do . That number is likely to drop again after this election , as divided delegations are at risk of single-party consolidation in Illinois , New Hampshire , Ohio , Florida , Colorado , Wisconsin , Nevada and Pennsylvania .
In 2018 , the top Senate target seats will be held by vulnerable Democrats in West Virginia , Montana , North Dakota and Missouri . Two years from now it ’ s reasonable to foresee a Senate with only seven or eight states electing split delegations – a number lower than at any time in history .
This streamlining trend has already played itself out in the South and Northeast . Among the states of the old Confederacy , only Florida and Virginia still send Democrats to the Senate , and in New England , only Maine ’ s Susan Collins and New Hampshire ’ s Kelly Ayotte carry the Republican banner .