With the anger over Joe Manchin’s support of Kavanaugh, one point that has been brought up in more than one comment is “the Republicans are successful by focusing on their base, we should do the same”. It sounds appealing, and in some contexts, it might even work.
Unfortunately, for the Senate it will not work. Because the Senate gives disproportionate power to small states that lean red, the result is a very hostile map.
To analyze this, I broke the states into three categories: Blue, Red, and Swing. And while some might quibble with the categorization of one or two states, one thing that is apparent is that there are more Red states than Blue states. That we have even as many Senators as we currently have is only because we’ve done better in the Red states than Republicans have in the Blue states.
Here’s how I divided the states up:
Blue states (17 total): California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia.
Red states (24 total): Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Alaska.
Swing states (9 total): Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire.
Looking at who actually represents each of these states in the Senate, I was interested to note that the 17 Blue states send only Democrats to the Senate — not a single Republican currently represents any of these states. Conversely, six of those Red states (Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Alabama, West Virginia, and Indiana) are represented by a split delegation of one Democrat and one Republican.
And those Swing states? They’re evenly split, sending nine Democrats and nine Republicans to the Senate. Most of these states send one each, but Iowa currently has two Republicans and New Hampshire has two Democrats.
But the bottom line is that if Republicans could win all of the Red states and 50% of the Swing states, they end up with 57 Senators. If we win all of the Blue states and 50% of the Swing states, that leaves us with a rather dismal 43 Senators. Even if we win every seat in both the Blue and Swing states, we only end up with a narrow majority of 52 seats.
So the bad news is that for now we need to appeal outside our base for at least a few Senate seats in order to win a majority of the Senate.
But there is a silver lining, which is that politics is not static. Sometimes that hurt us (ie, West Virginia used to be Blue, and now it is Red), sometimes it helps us (Virginia has moved from being Red to Blue in a remarkably short time). Looking to the future, if we can move Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona from the Red category to the Swing category, a base strategy would become more viable. If Nevada and Colorado move from Swing to Blue, that would also help.
Today, we can’t use a base strategy to win the Senate, but that may change in a decade.
