Democrats feel they were robbed, and some of their arguments these days are more absurd than others. The most absurd may be the implication that the GOP’s Senate majority deserves an asterisk because, as Nation editor John Nichols puts it:
Clinton’s winning the popular vote count for president and Ds lead popular vote count for US Senate:
Total D vote: 45.2M
Total R vote: 39.3M— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) November 12, 2016
This little idea is beginning to kindle some flames in media circles. Here’s Matt Pearce of the L.A. Times mentioning it. Here’s Mother Jones editor Aaron Wiener on the same note.
At first glance, it’s intriguing. Upon closer inspection, it’s a worthless point.
Most importantly, not every state has a Senate race every year. One state with no Senate race in 2016: Texas, the largest Republican state in the country. This is a big deal, considering that the largest margin of victory in any Senate election in 2014 was Sen. John Cornyn’s 1.3 million-vote victory.
The California factor also throws the count way off. In California, instead of running for a nomination in partisan primaries, all candidates of all parties run in a multi-party primary, and the top two finishers run in an election-day runoff.
This year, the Senate runoff was between two Democrats. So all 8.5 million votes in that state’s Senate race went to Democrats.
So the biggest red state doesn’t have a Senate race, and the biggest blue state has one where Republicans weren’t on the ballot, making this “popular vote for the Senate” statistic totally irrelevant.
Given that the Democrats didn’t win a single Senate race in a state which Trump won, it’s more fair to say this: Had all 100 senators’ seats been on the ballot, the GOP would have had a shot at 60 Senate seats.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
