118th Senate

By: Christopher Lilley

In this project, I collected public information and used it to visually the balance of power in the United States Senate.

Objectives

• Visualize the control of each state
• Visualize control of chamber

The Data

For this project I had to create the dataset. I used a CREATE TABLE statement and INSERT statement to enter data for id, state, name, party, year_elected, next_election, seniority, class, caucus_with, state_color, abbr. The column titles are mostly self explanatory. The seniority column has two values jr. or sr. The class column has three values: 1, 2, or 3. Senators serve six years. Their terms are staggered so that every two years a third of all seats go up for election. Class 3 seats have an election in 2028, class 2 in 2026, and class 1 in 2024. The caucus_with column refers to which party the senator caucuses with. Essentially this is the party the senator votes with. There are three senators with no party affiliations. In theory, they could caucus with either party. Currently, all of them caucus with the Democratic Party. States with two Democratic senators are blue, two Republicans are red, one Republican and one Democrat are purple, states with a Republican and independent are lite red, and states with a Democrat and independent are lite blue.

Control by State

For clarity, blue states have two Democratic senators, red states have two Republican senators, purple states have one Republican and one Democratic senator, teal states have one independent senator and one Democratic senator, and pink states have one independent senator and one Republican senator.

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One area of difficulty was dealing with Alaska and Hawaii. Normally, they would not be visible without zooming out and showing additional parts of the map. So I looked at some of the visualizations on Tableau Public. One method of including these states is to make separate visualizations and including them in the dashboard. I used filters to create a visualization for Alaska, one or Hawaii, and one for the mainland. Then I included the Alaska and Hawaii visualizations and set them to floating.

Control of Chamber

Since, the Independents (orange) in the Senate currently caucus with the Democrats (blue), they are included in the same column. The chamber control line indicates the threshold for control. The Democratic caucus barely passes the threshold. They currently hold a one vote majority.

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Count of States Under Each Party's Control

22 States are under Republican control, 21 are under Democratic control, four are contested, two are split between a Democrat and an Independent, and one is split between a Republican and an Independent. These are the facts on paper. In reality, the Independents in the Senate vote with Democrats. So it is more accurate to say that the Republicans control 22 states, the Democrats control 23, and five are contested.

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Insight

The main insight is how partisan senate control seems to be. There is a two seat lead for the Democratic senators and only five out of 50 states are under contested control.

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