US 2018 Senate Election Civics Lesson

In the 2018 midterm election Democrats received more total national votes than the Republicans in Senatorial contests by a margin of 47.9 million to 34.3 million. Thus the question has come up as to how the GOP is still controlling the Senate after the 2018 midterm.

Keep this in mind that we are a constitutional democratic republic and the system was set up to work in such a way to protect state rights. In a national parliamentary system the Democrats would control more legislative seats. Consider these points.

• Under our federal system states elect two Senators regardless of the state's population. Thus CA and NY will have many more potential votes than does WY or VT for each Senate election thus a big win for a particular party in large states can run up the national total.

• Second, the Democrats had many more incumbent seats in play last night and most actually won by fairly wide margins - the media was focused on a few close races. Bear in mind that Warren's win in Massachusetts gave the Democrats a margin of over 750k votes while Scott's apparent win in Florida was by less than 15k votes. This yields a a net plurality of over 700k votes for the Democratic vote total, but one senator is elected from each party. 

• Lastly, under the California open primary rules, two Democrats ran against each other netting over 7 million total Democratic votes and zero Republican senatorial votes in CA. 

Onwards!

The Prof