Filed Candidates By Political Party
As of September 7, 2020, 519 candidates were filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for U.S. Senate in 2020. Of those, 402â199 Democrats and 203 Republicansâwere from one of the two major political parties. In 2018, 527 candidates filed with the FEC to run for U.S. Senate, including 137 Democrats and 240 Republicans.
The following chart shows the number of filed candidates by political party.
Easy Races Tough Races
In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has held strong, sustained leads in the polls for months over Republican Sen. Martha McSally.;
He’s an astronaut and husband of former lawmaker Gabrielle;Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 and became a gun-control activist.
In Maine, Trump has all but longtime incumbent Susan Collins. She appeared unbeatable until recently, winning;her last race, in 2014, by 37 points.
She’s now trailing in the polls to the speaker of Maine’s legislature, Sara Gideon. Coleman said Collins is being pulled apart by the polarized politics of our time.
Collins frequently enrages Democrats and moderates by voting with Trump. Yet she also infuriates Trump allies; a research project by the news website Axios found that Collins is actually the No. 1 most likely of all congressional Republicans to condemn Trump in a controversy.;
“She’s really tried to walk the line of being a moderate in the Trump era. And that’s just very hard,” Coleman said.
Are Senators Chosen By Popular Vote
Beginning with the 1914 general election, all U.S. senators have been chosen by direct popular election. The Seventeenth Amendment also provided for the appointment of senators to fill vacancies. There have been many landmark contests, such as the election of Hiram Revels, the first African American senator, in 1870.
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List Of Current Members Of The Us Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the United States of America’s federal government. It consists of two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives, with members chosen through direct election.
Congress has 535 voting members. The Senate has 100 voting officials, and the House has 435 voting officials, along with five delegates and one resident commissioner.
to find your representatives with Ballotpedia’s “Who represents me?” tool.
Us Senate Representation Is Deeply Undemocratic And Cannot Be Changed
Few, if any, other democracies have anything this undemocratic built into their systems.
The U.S. Senate, as you know, is currently divided 50-50 along party lines, thanks to the impressive double win in Georgia, and counting the two technically independent senators as Democrats, since they caucus with the Democrats.
But, according to the calculation of Ian Millhiser, writing for Vox, if you add up the population of states and assign half to each of their two senators, the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.
Millhisers piece is named after that fact: Americas anti-democratic Senate, in one number.
41.5 million. Thats a lot of people, more than 10 percent of the population . You might think that in a democracy, the party that held that much of an advantage might end up with a solid majority in the Senate, rather than have just barely eked out a 50-50 tie in a body that, taken together, represents the whole country.
Republicans have not won the majority of the votes cast in all Senate races in any election cycle for a long time. Nonetheless, Republicans held majority control of the Senate after the elections of 2014, and 2016 and 2018 and still, after the 2020 races, held 50 of the 100 seats.
GOP does better in lower population states
Works to the detriment of Democratic power
Its deeply undemocratic. Nothing can become federal law without passing the Senate.
Smaller states had to be reassured
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List Of Current United States Senators By Age
This is a list of current U.S. Senators sorted by age. The United States Constitution requires Senators to be at least 30 years of age. Age does not determine seniority in the Senate.
As of August 29, 2021, 5 senators are in their 80s, 18 are in their 70s, 32 are in their 60s, 30 are in their 50s, 14 are in their 40s, and 1 is in his 30s.
- The median age of currently serving Senators is 700921436488000000067;years, 339;days.
- The median age of taking office for currently serving Senators is 51 years, 75 days.
- The median length of their Senate terms to date is 700839925440000000012;years, 238;days.
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United States Senate Elections 2020
| U.S. Senate Elections by State |
| U.S. House Elections |
Elections to the U.S. Senate were held on . A total of 33 of the 100 seats were up for regular election.
Those elected to the U.S. Senate in the 33 regular elections on November 3, 2020, began their six-year terms on January 3, 2021.
Special elections were also held to fill vacancies that occurred in the 116th Congress, including 2020 special U.S. Senate elections in Arizona for the seat that John McCain won in 2016 and in Georgia for the seat that Johnny Isakson won in 2016.
Twelve seats held by Democrats and 23 seats held by Republicans were up for election in 2020. Heading into the election, Republicans had a majority with 53 seats. Democrats needed a net gain of four seats, or three in addition to winning the presidential election, to take control of the chamber. The vice president casts tie-breaking votes in the Senate.
On this page, you will find:
- Information on historical wave elections
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How Is Senate Majority Chosen
The Senate Republican and Democratic floor leaders are elected by the members of their party in the Senate at the beginning of each Congress. Depending on which party is in power, one serves as majority leader and the other as minority leader. The leaders serve as spokespersons for their partys positions on issues.
Effect Of Republican Retirements
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Indeed, 2020 was actually a Democratic-leaning year, with Biden winning the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. So theres a good chance that states will be at least a bit redder in 2022 than they were in 2020. That could make these retirements less of a blow to Republicans than they first appear. Whats more, by announcing their retirements so early, Burr, Toomey and Portman are giving the GOP as much time as possible to recruit potential candidates, shape the field of candidates in a strategic way in the invisible primary and raise more money for the open-seat campaign. And in Ohio specifically, Republicans still look like heavy favorites. Even in the Democratic-leaning environment of 2020, Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points, implying that its true partisan lean is probably even more Republican-leaning. Ohio is simply not the quintessential swing state it once was; dating back to the 2014 election cycle, Democrats have won just one out of 14 statewide contests in Ohio and that was a popular incumbent running in a blue-wave election year . |
| Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight |
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Many Republicans Mobilizing Against Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill
The bipartisan group of senators who crafted the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is preparing to take a victory lap as the Senate moves toward passing the bill in the coming days.
But a large number of Republicans are mobilizing against the bill that includes $1.2 trillion of spending and $550 billion in new spending on hard infrastructure projects, such as rail, ports, electric vehicle charging stations, and broadband.
Right after the group of bipartisan senators introduced the bills text on Sunday night, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee gave a long floor speech in opposition to the legislation, arguing that the Constitution does not give Congress to go out and spend money on anything that we deem appropriate and that the price tag is too high.
Shame on us for making poor and middle-class Americans poorer so that we can bring praise and adulation to ourselves and more money to a small handful of wealthy, well-connected interests in America, Lee said.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that he would vote against the bill, sharing an article that called it an epic binge of green subsidies and more handouts for states and localities.
Several Republicans in the House are also stating their opposition to the bill.
No one should support something that will serve as a trojan horse for the Democrats reconciliation package, which the White House wants to use to pass massive amnesty, the RSC memo read.
Washington Examiner Videos
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About The House Of Representatives
The United States is also divided into 435 congressional districts with a population of about 750,000 each. Each district elects a representative to the House of Representatives for a two-year term.
As in the Senate, the day-to-day activities of the House are controlled by the majority party. Here is a count of representatives by party:
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Republicans Secure Half Of Total Us Senate Seats
WASHINGTON U.S. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska won reelection Wednesday, assuring Republicans of at least 50 seats in the 100-member Senate for the next two years, while leaving control of the chamber uncertain until two runoff elections are held in Georgia in early January.
After slow vote-counting in the northwestern-most state of the U.S. after the November 3 election, news media concluded that Sullivan had an insurmountable lead over Al Gross, an orthopedic surgeon who ran as an independent candidate with Democratic support. The contest was called with Sullivan, a conservative, ahead by 20 percentage points.
With Republicans assured of at least half the Senate seats, attention now turns to the two January 5 runoff elections in the southern state of Georgia.
Two conservative Republican lawmakers Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler now hold the two seats, but both failed in separate contests last week to win a majority, forcing them into the runoffs.
Perdue faces Democrat Jon Ossoff, an investigative journalist who narrowly lost a 2017 race for a seat in the House of Representatives before trying to oust Perdue from the Senate seat he has held since 2015.
Loeffler, who was appointed to her Senate seat in early 2020, is facing Raphael Warnock, a progressive Democrat who is senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
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Govtrackus Is Taking A New Focus On Civic Education
Help us develop the tools to bring real-time legislative data into the classroom.
If youve visited a bill page on GovTrack.us recently, you may have noticed a new study guide tab located just below the bill title. This is part of a new project to develop better tools for bringing real-time legislative data into the classroom. We hope to enable educators to build lesson plans centered around any bill or vote in Congress, even those as recent as yesterday.
Were looking for feedback from educators about how GovTrack can be used and improved for your classroom. If you teach United States government and would like to speak with us about bringing legislative data into your classroom, please reach out!
Overlap With Other Forms Of Denial
Ultimately, the findings of this analysis show thatdespite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contraryclimate denial remains alive and well in the United States Congress, and its impacts are already costing lives. Furthermore, dangerous denial within Congress is not limited to climate change alone. By this analysis, 82 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and six U.S. senators are both climate deniers and members of the sedition caucusthose who denied the certified results of the 2020 general election and therefore supported President Trumps violent attempt to overturn these democratic results.*** There is also significant overlap between elected officials who deny climate science and elected officials who deny the reality of the pandemic that has sickened millions and claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans in the past year. In fact, as this analysis was being written, one congressman-elect and another congressman who had both cast doubt on the science around climate change died from COVID-19.
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| 1st: January 6, 2015 December 18, 20152nd: January 4, 2016; January 3, 2017 |
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Democrats Got Millions More Votes So How Did Republicans Win The Senate
Senate electoral process means although Democrats received more overall votes for the Senate than Republicans, that does not translate to more seats
The 2018 midterm elections brought significant gains for Democrats, who retook the House of Representatives and snatched several governorships from the grip of Republicans.
But some were left questioning why Democrats suffered a series of setbacks that prevented the party from picking up even more seats and, perhaps most consequentially, left the US Senate in Republican hands.
Among the most eye-catching was a statistic showing Democrats led Republicans by more than 12 million votes in Senate races, and yet still suffered losses on the night and failed to win a majority of seats in the chamber.
Constitutional experts said the discrepancy between votes cast and seats won was the result of misplaced ire that ignored the Senate electoral process.
Because each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, states such as Wyoming have as many seats as California, despite the latter having more than 60 times the population. The smaller states also tend to be the more rural, and rural areas traditionally favor Republicans.
This year, because Democrats were defending more seats, including California, they received more overall votes for the Senate than Republicans, but that does not translate to more seats.
The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable
Senators Committees And Other Legislative Groups
The Senates 63 members represent districts from across New York State. Senators belong to a single conference and one or more political parties.
Weve made it easy to filter senators by party, committee, and the other legislative groups in which they gather to consider the merits of proposed legislation and to better understand complex legislative issues.
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Senator has new policy idea
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Idea is drafted into a Bill
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Bill undergoes committee process
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Senate and Assembly pass bill
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Bill is signed by Governor
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Arguments For Expanding The Number Of House Members
Advocates;for increasing the number of seats in the House say such a move would increase the quality of representation by reducing the number of constituents each lawmaker represents. Each House member now represents about 710,000 people.
The group ThirtyThousand.org argues that the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights never intended for the population of each congressional district to exceed 50,000 or 60,000. âThe principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned,â the group argues.
Another argument for increasing the size of the House is that is would diminish the influence of lobbyists. That line of reasoning assumes that lawmakers would be more closely connected to their constituents and therefore less likely to listen to special interests.
Why Are There 438 House Of Representative Members
On this date, the House passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of Representatives at 435. The U.S. Constitution called for at least one Representative per state and that no more than one for every 30,000 persons. Thus, the size of a states House delegation depended on its population.
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