How the Senate decided impeachment

What can the impeachment vote tell us about the forces at work as our elected representatives grapple with key issues?

I recently cited British philosopher and parliamentarian Edmund Burke, a founding father of conservatism, who argued the trusteeship theory of representation. A legislator, Burke wrote, should not sacrifice to constituents “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience… Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

In other words, a proper representative should do what he or she thinks is right, irrespective of what his or her constituents might think.

Without access to the private thoughts of each senator, we can’t know which factors demined their vote. In fact, they may not know themselves exactly why they voted the way they did.

But we can catch a glimmer of the interplay of three powerful forces: partisanship, constituent preferences, and individual judgment. Partisanship here connotes senators siding with their own party — Democratic senators lined up on one side of the line, with most Republicans arrayed on the other.

Constituent preferences refers to the views of voters in each senators’ home state. We don’t have polling from each state on preferences for conviction versus acquittal, but we can use demographic data from national polling to (very roughly) estimate state level results.

Finally, there is the factor to which we have no access, senators’ personal judgments about the merits of the case.

Most members also reflected their constituents. By these crude calculations 84 senators voted the way their constituents would have wanted.

For the vast majority of senators, 77, personal partisanship, constituents’ preferences and their ultimate vote all went the same way.

Four senators clearly relied on their own independent judgment. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Bill Cassidy (La.), Mitt Romney (Utah), and Ben Sasse (Neb.) all voted against both their own party and the likely preferences of their constituents. Disregarding both co-partisan colleagues and voters’ views is particularly difficult and reflects significant political courage.

What happens though when personal partisanship and constituent demands conflict? Seven senators apparently faced that circumstance. Two, Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Susan Collins (Maine), ended up with their constituents instead of their party.

Ascribing purely political motivations to them strains credulity — Toomey had already announced he is not running in 2022 and therefore won’t face those voters again, while Collins just emerged victorious with a near landslide margin.

Arizona voters probably opposed conviction, just barely, but Joe Biden and Sen. Mark Kelly had just won the state. So Kelly, and colleague Kyrsten Sinema, joined their fellow Democrats in voting to convict.

Three other Democrats voted with their party, but at some potential peril. Jon Tester (Mont.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) in particular, and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) to a lesser extent, likely faced meaningful margins among home state voters against the positions they took on conviction.

Senators from Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin seemed to face even division among constituents, and all but Richard Burr (N.C.) ended up with their partisan colleagues.

Of course, it’s just one case, with only 100 senators, but it was a particularly important one. Nonetheless, any lessons are at best tentative.

In an era like ours, when politics is well sorted, most often a legislator’s own partisanship and their constituents’ views pull them in the same direction. Few resist that tide.

But the impeachment vote also shines further light on the power of partisanship. Whether that is the pull of abstract loyalty, agreement on first principles or the social pressure of a caucus of colleagues, is not at all clear, but partisanship seems to count for a lot.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.

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