How the Senate map shift helped Trump win acquittal [View all]
There's an increasingly tidy alignment between the Senate and the presidential partisan maps.
Feb. 14, 2021, 11:14 AM EST
By Dante Chinni
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial followed a very predictable partisan path in the U.S. Senate last week, with Democrats voting to convict and most Republicans voting to acquit. There is a long list of reasons behind that breakdown, but one of them is the increasingly tidy alignment between the Senate and the presidential partisan maps.
It used to be that many states featured divided Senate delegations, and that presidents won the vote in states represented by the opposite party in Congress’ upper chamber. But that pattern has been in decline for decades now. And it’s advanced to the point where today, in 2021, the presidential election and Senate maps look remarkably similar.
You can get a sense of the change by 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 held a lot of partisan diversity in the Senate.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/how-senate-map-shift-helped-trump-win-acquittal-n1257921