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The Race for Senate

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Corpus Callosum:

 

First we need to explain how the Senate works.

 

The Senate is composed of 100 senators, and the vice president sometimes; each senator is one of two who represent their state. Every two years, there’s a re-election, meaning that there are Senate seats which can be taken, flipped, held or kept. This was one of the years, there were 23 Republican seats up for re-election, and 12 Democrat seats up for re-election.

 

There were a lot of close races, but the seats that I will be focusing on are Arizona and Iowa.

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Let’s start with Iowa, where the two Republican and Democrat senators running against each other were Joni Ernst, the Republican and incumbent (meaning they originally held the seat)  vs Theresa Greenfield, the Democrat.

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But first, we have to talk about policies. For those of you who don’t know what policies are, they’re things that candidates, like Joni Ernst and Theresa Greenfield, promise to do if they get elected. Let’s start with Joni.

 

Some of her policies were small and large businesses should equally grow, ACA [Affordable Care Act] is bad, people should use guns in self-defense and, like most Republicans, Covid isn’t real.

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Whereas Theresa Greenfield’s policies were we should expand on ACA, big corporations aren't good, don’t discriminate against people of colour, guns should be banned and climate change is real.

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To be honest, this was pretty common among Republican and Democrat candidates in 2020,  probably because of Donald Trump, so it was basically just either you were a Republican or you were a Democrat. According to the polls, Joni Ernst had a higher possibility of winning the seat, a 58% chance of victory and 42% chance of defeat. After a close race, Joni Ernst won, which let the Republican’s hold onto a seat

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Our second state is Arizona.

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Arizona was one of two states that were flipped, meaning that it changed from one party (Republican) to the other (Democrat).  The two candidates were Martha McSally and Mark Kelly. Martha’s chances of winning weren’t very high, with 22% chance of victory and 78% chance of defeat. Her policies were essentially the same as most Republicans so I’m not going to go over them. And with Mark Kelly, basically the same thing, not very different [from many Democrats]. So, as expected, Mark Kelly won the seat, flipping a previously Republican state.

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At the time I'm making this, the two senators from Georgia are in a run-off, meaning that they’ll have a vote on January 4th, because no one got 50% of the vote. This means that right now the Senate has 48 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators. If Democrats win both of those races, the Senate will be at 50-50 tie, so the Democrats will have a majority because the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, will act as a tiebreaker for them. But if Republicans win at least one seat, they’ll have majority.

 

If the people vote exactly the same as they did back in November, the first election, the Republicans will win, because the two Republicans won’t be taking votes from each other anymore; so votes will only go to one Republican.

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In the end, the race for the Senate was really close, with Republican senators winning key states even though the polls were against them. 

 

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