The Most Influential Senate Primaries in 2022 Are the Ones That Aren’t Happening - Part 1

Oct 3

Article by Lorenzo Levy | Photo by Chad Stembridge

When setting up the legislative branch of the US government, the framers of the Constitution made a bicameral Congress, with a House of Representatives and a Senate. Among the several distinctions between these two legislative chambers was the manner in which members were elected. The Constitution mandates that the members of the House be “chosen every second Year by the People of the several States,” meaning that House members are up for reelection every two years.

In contrast, the Constitution mandates that members of the Senate be “chosen by the Legislature” of each state and that they serve six-year terms. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, which made US senators “elected by the people.” This remains how Senators are elected, although Don Bolduc, the presumed Republican nominee for Senate in New Hampshire endorsed by disgraced former reality show host and professional wrestler Donald Trump, has publicly called for Senators to be chosen by state legislatures instead of the voters.

However shocking such rhetoric is, I would like to focus on another aspect of senatorial elections prescribed in the Constitution, namely, that senatorial elections are staggered in two-year intervals. Senators are divided into first, second, and third classes, with roughly 33 Senators in each class in any given election cycle. These distinctions refer to when the Senators face reelection.

Class 1 senators first faced re-election in 1790, then 1796, then 1802, and so on. The most recent Class 1 Senate election was in 2018, and the next one will be in 2024. Similarly, Class 2 senators first faced re-election in 1792, then 1798, then 1804, and so on. The most recent Class 2 Senate election was in 2020, and the next one will be in 2026. Finally, Class 3 senators first faced re-election in 1790, then 1796, then 1802, and so on. The most recent Class 3 Senate election was in 2016, and the next one will be this November, in 2022.

The term-lengths of Constitutional offices were by no means unintentional. Since the House was conceived as the institution with the most direct representation of “the people,” it makes sense that House members were given the shortest term-length of two years, so they would constantly have to be accountable to voters. Similarly, the six-year terms in the Senate were created in sharp contrast to the two-year house terms, so that Senators did not have to be as accountable to voters (or state legislatures before 1913) as their peers in the House. This, along with other controversial aspects of the Senate such as disproportionately large representation to states with small populations (both California and Wyoming have only two Senators), is indicative of the intentionally undemocratic nature of the Senate.

The 2022 Senate Primaries have served as clear examples of the effect that staggered Senate elections have on the democratic process. There are 35 Senate seats up for reelection this November. However, not every incumbent Senator is running for reelection. Only one incumbent Democrat, President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy of Vermont, is not running for reelection. Leahy is 82 years old with several notable health issues and has been serving in the Senate since 1974, so this retirement has not come as too much of a shock. The more interesting political analysis comes with the Republicans who are retiring.

Republican Senators Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Richard Shelby of Alabama are both retiring, even though they represent deep-red states that voted for Trump in 2020 by over 25 percentage points, and even though midterm elections have historically favored the party out of power. Therefore, neither Senator felt any significant pressure to appear bipartisan to their constituents and vote for any of President Biden’s bipartisan bills, such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) or the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022).

However, for other retiring Senate Republicans, the opposite was true. Since they did not have to face a Republican primary where they would have to prove their loyalty to the Republican agenda, retiring Republican incumbents Roy Blunt (R-MO), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Rob Portman (R-OH) were among the few Senate Republicans who voted for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a key element of President Biden’s domestic agenda.

Similarly, Blunt, Burr, Portman, and retiring Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey voted for Biden’s key gun control legislation, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022). However, the ultimate display of how significant these retiring Republicans are comes with Trump’s second impeachment. Out of the only seven Senate Republicans to vote to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 Insurrection, two of them were Burr and Toomey. Although Portman did not vote to convict, he was one of the six Senate Republicans to vote to create a committee to investigate the events of January 6, although these six votes were insufficient to overcome a Republican filibuster.

For Republicans, voting publicly against the interests of Donald Trump, their de facto leader and presumed nominee for president in 2024, seems like it would be political suicide, and for most Republicans, it would be. This is why the Republicans who publicly vote against Trump’s personal interests or refuse to go along with his partisan grievances against President Biden and support Biden’s bipartisan legislation fall into a handful of categories: the retiring Republicans, the Republicans not up for reelection, and what I will call the “bipartisans.”

Thus far, I have mainly discussed the first of these categories, but the second and third categories are similarly significant. For the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 8 of the 19 Republicans that voted for it are not up for reelection until 2026, and 4 are not up until 2024.

For the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 8 of the 15 Republicans that voted for it are not up for reelection until 2026, and 1 is not up for reelection until 2024. For Trump’s second impeachment, 3 of the 7 Republicans who voted to convict are not up for reelection until 2026, and 1 is not up for reelection until 2024.

For those keeping track of the numbers, this still leaves a handful of Republican Senators up for reelection in 2022 who did vote against Trump’s wishes and in favor of Biden’s agenda. For example, Todd Young (R-IN) voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but he had already won his primary unopposed a month earlier. With the primary out of the way, a Republican candidate’s goal becomes appearing bipartisan to reach voters in the general election, as opposed to the primaries, where candidates typically highlight their party loyalty. John Hoeven voted for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but this was not significant enough to preclude Donald Trump himself from endorsing his reelection.

Then there is Lisa Murkowski.

Lisa Murkowski has long been known as one of the most bipartisan Republicans in the Senate, even supporting reproductive rights. She is also notable as having lost her primary in 2010 to a more extreme Republican but still winning as a write-in candidate. Alaska, although not a blue state by any means (it has not gone to a Democrat on the presidential level since 1964), is not nearly as lopsided in terms of partisan composition as most other red states. For example, Alaska had a Democratic Senator, Mark Begich, as recently as 2015, and more recently, Democrat Mary Peltola won the 2022 Special Election for Alaska’s at-large House seat against Trump-endorsed former Alaska governor and Republican nominee for president Sarah Palin.

It would seem that Lisa Murkowski’s bipartisan record would make her a very attractive candidate for Republicans to promote. Recognizing this, although they are much more conservative than Murkowski, establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott (the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee) opted to endorse her. However, given Murkowski’s longtime and public criticism of Trump and eventual vote to convict him in his second impeachment trial has made her a high profile enemy of the MAGA movement, Trump endorsed the more MAGA-aligned Kelly Tshibaka to run against Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican Senate candidate in 2022 to be running against a Trump endorsed candidate. This incident has further alienated figures from the establishment Republican party, especially Mitch McConnell, from the MAGA base.

In most other states, someone like Murkowski would be trying to present themselves to be as in-line with the party as possible, so as to avoid a primary challenge. What makes Murkowski’s situation different is that Alaska does not have a conventional primary system, instead relying on an open primary where all candidates are running against each other regardless of party; only the top four candidates advance to the general election. Since Murkowski is not only marketing herself to Republican primary voters but to the entire Alaskan electorate, she benefits from portraying herself as a bipartisan moderate.

This incentive is compounded by the fact that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, meaning that it is strategically beneficial to campaign to be the first choice for Republicans but also the second choice of Democrats or Independents. Ranked choice voting also benefited noted Trump critic and bipartisan Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, since she can receive crossover second choice votes from Democrats in the general election. (As of December 1, 2021, Maine now only uses ranked choice voting for certain primary elections, not general elections.)

Although Murkowski has undoubtedly benefited electorally from her bipartisan reputation, she has made several notable moves to market herself to her more hardline conservative constituents. Along with all other Republicans in the Senate voted against the American Rescue Plan, which provided essential aid for economic recovery for a US economy debilitated by COVID, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided the largest climate investment ever and worked to reduce prescription drug prices. Even though she ended up voting for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, she was not part of the group of Senators who initially announced the compromise deal on gun control following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Additionally, when the Women’s Healthcare Protection Act came up for a vote in 2022, which would have codified the protections of Roe v. Wade (1973) in law after the Supreme Court took them away, Murkowski, along with fellow “pro-choice” Republican Senator Susan Collins, voted against it citing religious liberty concerns for Catholic hospitals not wanting to provide abortions. In that same year, however, she was one of the only three Republicans (along with Collins and Mitt Romney) to vote to confirm the pro-choice Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson as the first Black woman on the bench. Thus, she can say to liberal voters that she confirmed a pro-choice justice to the Supreme Court and at the same time say to conservative voters that she obstructed codifying Roe into law.

None of this is to say that these Republicans escape scrutiny from conservative constituents for their bipartisanship. Out of the seven Republican Senators who voted to impeach Trump, three were censured by their state’s Republican party, while the remaining four were censured by the Republican parties of counties. Censures, it should be noted, are strictly symbolic actions, but they are indicative of mass discontent within a party.

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas was censured by a county’s Republican party and booed on stage at the Texas GOP Convention for leading bipartisan gun control negotiations after the Uvalde school shooting, which happened in Texas. It should also be noted that the other Republican Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, was steadfastly opposed to even the compromise gun control package, even though he too represented the state where the Uvalde school shooting happened. It remains to be seen how Cruz’s dogged determination to gun “rights” will affect him in his reelection in 2024. It is entirely possible that in a political media environment that moves at hyperspeed that something Ted Cruz did in 2022 will go forgotten in 2024. Needless to say, there are a number of Ted Cruz incidents that Republican strategists are hoping Texas voters will forget, from his aforementioned opposition to common sense life-saving gun legislation, to attending an NRA convention the same week as the Uvalde school shooting, to vacationing in Cancun while Texas froze without power (and then blaming his blunder on his wife and daughters), or enabling and aiding Trump’s attempted coup, to name a few.

In sum, staggered Senate primaries have allowed Republican senators in select contexts to escape temporarily the cultish stranglehold that Trump and his goons have put on American democracy and vote for common sense bipartisan legislation that nevertheless would jeopardize their political standing in a primary. We have also seen an exception to this with Lisa Murkowski, whose status as a moderate and bipartisan has often forced her to the right to withstand primary challenges. 2024 could likely see a similar dynamic with Mitt Romney in Utah, and 2026 with Senators like Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy.

Sources Cited

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/new-hampshire-republican-senate-hopefuls-trash-fbi-2020-election-resul-rcna43133

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055936681/vermonts-patrick-leahy-says-he-will-retire-from-the-u-s-senate

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html

https://www.inhofe.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/announcement-from-sen-jim-inhofe

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/shelby-senate-spending/2021/11/11/a9fb3376-42f8-11ec-9ea7-3eb2406a2e24_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/republicans-senate-infrastructure.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/politics/republican-senators-break-filibuster-gun-safety-bill/index.html

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00218.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/03/us/elections/results-indiana-us-senate.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/sen-john-hoeven-beats-political-newcomer-in-north-dakota-gop-primary