Down. There are exceptions, but the rule holds.
My metaphor is that the Senate is on a staircase. At the top is a spirit of compromise that allows the Senate to reach a lot of decisions that mostly please no constituency entirely; the satisfaction gauge tilts towards the majority, but with due respect for the minority when the choice isn't a stark yes/no with no middle ground. On occasion, the gauge tilts to the minority's side.
"Majority" and "minority" are by issue, not by party. There may be a correlation, but it's not lockstep. When I see lockstep, I know that they're not near the top. More and more often, I see things that must be in lockstep, that brokers no compromise or mitigation of extreme views. And more and more people call it good when that tilts the gauge in their direction, and evil when it tilts away from them. They've set themselves up as the only true moral good for society; the Puritans would recognize this, in spades, even if it is a character of both atheists and deists and theists, of those on the right and on the left, of those who see everything ideologically or solely economically.
At the bottom lie stark polarized opposites, with parties in absolute lockstep. We're not there.
But every session of the Senate has a funny kind of controversy. The minority side says that the step they are on must be the lowest step ever reached. Of course, the current minority is precisely the one who decided to go down to that step the last time around. The majority looks and sees profit in going down another step or two or three, and when they become the minority party they'll lambast the majority for using the tools that they purchased at the cost of so much ill-will and acrimony.
Both parties play to the margins. In the end, they'll become marginalized, but until then as the country flip-flops parties the ideological flip-flop is a bit more extreme and those on the margins, those who almost were able to finally seize the power that their god (a deity or history or social justice or whatever) says they and they alone should have are ever more frustrated and ever more enveloped in the apocalyptic. Meanwhile, its those in the middle that are shot at from both sides and take the most damage. Of course, left-of-center (D) are closer to the nowhere-near-center (D) and so take more damaging fire from that side than from the (R). Right-of-center (R) are closer to the nowhere-near-center (R) and so take more damaging fire from that side than from the (D). In a civil war, political, ideological, or using actual ammo it's the majority that suffer at the hands of the two extreme minorities, both of whom view themselves as righteous and, in fact, the majority.
And we worry about fake news that few noticed and which probably made scant difference compared to the partisan-whipped true-but-pointless news ... like emails. http://www.npr.org/2017/01/23/511267145/economist-calculates-impact-of-fake-news-on-trumps-election Notice that the economist in that link doesn't address one point: He doesn't evaluate the likelihood that those who saw the fake news were already firmly in one camp or the other, so that it made no difference to their votes. He evaluates how salient the news stories were, so how much they *could* have effected the vote. (But in today's post-fact news environment, possibility = fact when it's part the news that's print to fit.)
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