Welcome to the most unrepresentative Senate election since World War II
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The second reason for the unrepresentativeness of a cycle’s Senate elections is more of a matter of historical circumstance. The Constitution directed that senators be assigned equally into three classes (Class 1, Class 2 and Class 3), with the six-year terms for each class to be staggered by two years. This means that Senate elections occur in any particular year in only about two-thirds of the 50 states. (In 2014, elections are for the seats in Class 2.) The initial assignment of senators to classes (undertaken by the Senate shortly after it first convened in 1789) appears to have been carried out with an eye toward balancing the young nation’s population, regions and political views among the three classes. But that has changed over time. As this great post by the University of Virginia’s Geoffrey Skelley shows, states with Class 2 seats now make up a much smaller share of the national population (52 percent) than do those with Class 1 or Class 3 seats (at 75 and 73 percent, respectively). And as many observers (including Ben Highton here on the Monkey Cage) have noted, states with Class 2 seats are much more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole this year.
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For most of the past six decades, these two trends tracked each other very closely: the parties’ relative strength in the set of Senate seats up for election was no different from their strength nationally. But that changed after the 2000 presidential election, in which the Republican Party’s dominance in the South emerged in full force. This in turn led Class 2 Senate seats to be particularly strong for the GOP: There is a Class 2 seat in all but one state of the former Confederacy — Florida.
Senate elections took place in Class 2 states in 2002, 2008 and now 2014. In each of these cycles, there is a substantial difference between the parties’ relatively even performance at the national level and the Republicans’ strength in Senate seats up for election. This year, the gap is profound: in the typical Senate election state, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney ran ahead of his national margin by more than seven percentage points.
Simply put, this year’s Senate elections are unrepresentative of the nation to an extent that is unprecedented in elections held in the post-war era. So when we begin to sift through the results on Election Night, the number of Senate seats won and lost will tell us less than we might like about where the two parties stand in the minds of American voters.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/03/welcome-to-the-most-unrepresentative-senate-election-since-world-war-ii/
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