How Big is the Majority?

According to the New York Times, Republicans in Congress are upset that Democrats are "stalling" legislation. And just what are the Democrats protesting? Apparently, the Republican leadership has frozen Democrats out of participation on conference committees, which are formed to reconcile competing versions of legislation passed in the House and Senate. Conference committees are the place where the real work of Congress is done, since the conferees work out what provisions stay in a bill and what provisions come out.

Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, is incensed: "To think the minority can write a predetermined outcome to every bill that comes through the Senate is pretty presumptuous." [link]

On its face, Frist's and the Republicans' position has a ring of apparent common sense to it -- after all, the Democrats are the minority party, right?

Not so fast.

When you tally the votes in the 2002 House races, Republican candidates collectively gathered 3.4 million more votes than their opponents. In the Senate, it's a little more complex: let's recall that only one-third of the Senate is up for election each election year. In order to measure the overall Republican majority, therefore, we must tally the votes received not just in 2002, but in 2000 and 1998, as well.

Pay attention, because here's where it gets interesting:

The Senate of the 108th Congress consists of 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats and 1 independent. The 51 Republican Senators collectively received 44,265,695 votes in the most recent election for their seats (1998, 2000 or 2002). If you count Senator Jeffords, who was elected as a Republican, but subsequently became an independent, the total votes for Republican senators is 44,454,828. Now look at the Democrats: the 48 Democratic Senators collectively received 53,425,954 votes -- between 8.9 million and 9.1 million more votes than the Republicans.

So let's do the math, shall we? 8.9 million minus 3.4 million equals 5.5 million more people who voted for Democrats than Republicans.

Putting it all together, it looks like Senator Frist was right: it IS presumptuous for a minority to think it can write a predetermined outcome to every bill that comes through the Senate...

[Note: This post was originally published without sources for the election data. All data was drawn from the Federal Election Commission's website (link)]