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I just finished reading this Digby post on the Versailles fetish for "bipartisan" solutions, and I had an idea for framing an argument that may be useful in this and other ongoing political fights regarding the Senate. The data we need, which I'm sure is publicly available, is this: how many votes did each senator receive when winning his/her Senate seat?
"Centrists" like Broder, Gergen, etc., get off on wringing their hands over how a lack of bipartisan Congressional support shows that a piece of legislation doesn't have genuine, broad-based public support. When (if) the Senate passes its version of health care reform, I'd like to see a study that reveals how many Americans actually voted for the senators who supported the bill, compared with how many Americans voted for the senators who opposed it. That would give us a number to offer in opposition to that idea.
If, say, supporters of the bill represent 60 million American voters while opponents represent only 40 million, that should serve as a pretty powerful piece of evidence that the measure has broad-based support. Given the population differences between red and blue states, the number should be even more lopsided than that. (Maybe for appointed senators, we'd substitute the number of votes received by the governor who appointed the senator).
Based on what I've read here, it seems to me that someone in the OpenLeft community has a lot of this data already gathered together, so this is partly a bleg to find out if that's true. If nobody has it, I'll see if I can assemble it from online sources. Such a table of data could be useful on any vote, given that progressive priorities tend to be supported by senators from more populous states.
UPDATE: O.K., I did the work. By my calculations, senators in the Democratic Congress were elected by almost twice as many American voters as senators in the Republican Caucus - 80.1 million to 43.8 million. More detail here.
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STATE BLOGS
