That isn’t much better than the probability of calling a coin-flip correctly, although the GOP may have the slightest of edges. Republicans have a 59-in-100 chance of taking control of the chamber, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast, which is now frozen. As a result, a one-seat gain by Republicans would be enough to give them control, whereas Democrats need to avoid any net losses to retain their advantage.īut the fate of the Senate looks to be on a knife’s edge. The chamber is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, 1 but Democrats hold a precarious majority via the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. This entry was posted in Research on Februby nwhillman.Just about no part of the 2022 midterms is more uncertain than the race for control of the U.S. I am no political scientist, so I can’t get too deep in the weeds, but this can help me frame some of our discussions around the broader partisan context in which higher education policy is being made. This helps me frame our class discussions around the broader political, social, demographic, and economic mechanisms driving these changes. But how this has changed over time, the magnitude of growth, and overlaying these trends onto the same graph is something new to me. These trends aren’t really surprising since we know Republicans have control of legislative chambers both in the states and in Congress. This is now the situation for Republicans, who have picked up state legislative party control and have gained majorities in Congress since 2010-2012. Same goes for Republicans:įor a brief period in the early 1980s, Democrats held majorities in the House and Senate while also having party control of the majority of state legislatures. This chart shows three lines: the two light blue lines show the percent of Senate and House seats held by Democrats, the dark blue is the share of state with Democratic party control. In the House, we see similar trends where Democrats held 64% of seats in 1978 and this has slowly dropped to about 45% today (194 D to 241 R).īut these three charts are hard to put the full picture together, so the following combines them into a single visualization that I think tells the story a little clearer: In the Senate during this period, Democrats went from a high of 58 of seats in 1978 down to 46 in the current (115th) Congress. Shifting gears to Congress, the chart shows the percentage of members from each of the two parties: This results in an inverse portrait where 31 states were controlled by Democrats in 1978 and, fast-forwarding to the post-2016 election, 32 states are now controlled by Republicans. At that time, states were becoming more split and slowly more Republican-controlled until Democrats gained a short-lived advantage around 2006. In this time frame, Democrats held party control in state legislatures until the early 1990s. And all data are as of January of the given year, except 2016, which uses December to reflect the outcomes of the most recent election: Nebraska is omitted because it has a non-partisan unicameral legislature, but I put them in the “Split plus NE” category just so we have all 50 states. If Democrats hold both chambers, then the state is coded as “Democrat.” States are coded as “Split” if Democrats carry one chamber and Republicans the other. For the states, NCSL tells us whether both chambers are controlled by a given party. So in its absence (and in losing patience digging around), I compiled data from the Senate and House history pages along with the National Conference of State Legislatures partisan composition page.Ī few notes about what’s being measured here. We often just focus on one or the other, but I want to see Congress and states on the same graph.īut I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. Just a simple chart showing trends in which party holds the majority in the House and Senate and whether similar trends occur in state legislatures. In the politics of education course I teach this semester, I was looking for a nice overview of trends in party control for Congress and state legislatures.
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