WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial followed a very predictable party path in the U.S. Senate last week, with Democrats voting to condemn and most Republicans voting to absolve. There is a long list of reasons behind this collapse, but one is the increasingly organized alignment between the Senate and the president’s party maps.
In the past, many states had divided delegations in the Senate and presidents won the vote in states represented by the opposite party in the upper house of Congress. But that pattern has been in decline for decades. And it has advanced to the point that today, in 2021, the presidential election and Senate maps are remarkably similar.
You can get a sense of the change 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 party diversity in the Senate.
Almost half of the states he won, 15, were represented by fully democratic delegations. Three of the states he won were represented by entirely republican delegations. And almost half, 14, were represented by divided delegations: a Democrat and a Republican.
In these divided and republican states, this meant that senators from the opposite party were responding to voters who had also just elected a Democrat to the White House. There was some impetus 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 that the party line was more diffuse at that time, but it became much clearer in the following years.
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, he had 28 states and there was a notable increase in the partisanship 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. A 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 delegations in the Senate that did not vote for Obama. These states – Arkansas, West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota – were preparing to take on a more Republican cast. Six of the eight senators in those states are now Republicans.
The net impact was that Obama had to rely more heavily on the group of purely Democratic senators. He simply had less electoral influence over Republican delegations and divided.
But those numbers still seem relatively bipartisan compared to where we are in 2021. The 2020 presidential results align almost perfectly with the partisanship of the current Senate delegations.
President Joe Biden conquered 25 states en route to the White House and 22 of them maintain Democratic delegations in the Senate. The other three come from states with divided delegations. None comes from states with Republican delegations.
This probably limits the power of Biden’s presidential aggressor pulpit to influence the other side of the Senate. It also suggests some of the reasons why we saw so much loyalty to former President Donald Trump in last week’s impeachment trial. The overwhelming 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 Democratic victories in Republican states have declined considerably and consistently since Bill Clinton. Part of this has to do with changes in the policy of these 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 comes with the victory of presidents in states with divided delegations. And this has less to do with the ability of these presidents to appeal to “divided states” than with the fact that there are simply not many states with divided delegations. Split Senate delegations have become an endangered species in American politics.
In 1993, Clinton’s first term, almost half of the nation’s states had divided delegations. In George W. Bush’s first term, the number was 14. There were 13 states for Obama’s first term and 12 for Donald Trump’s term. Currently, there are only half a dozen states with divided delegations in the Senate.
This means that when a new president arrives in the city and hopes to set an agenda, he is immediately dealing with a Senate where party divisions are rigid and where there is probably little motivation for concessions. It also means that you are more likely to receive the same party story that we saw at the impeachment trial last week.
To be clear, none of this means that the behavior that currently defines the Senate is “wise” or “good for politics”, but it is also not irrational, considering the divisions that exist in the country. In the past 30 years, voters have spoken and created a deeply partisan body on Capitol Hill.