The Dream of a Non-Partisan Senate

It's showing glimmers of life, in Nebraska and Montana

We all have embarrassing fantasies, I imagine, and most of us keep them to themselves. I have a bad habit of sharing mine with other people. One of these, one I’ve shared before and will share again now, is of an American Senate that works more like the way it was intended to, which is to say: not as a partisan body.

Could that fantasy actually become reality? To make it so, you would need a Senate that was closely divided between Democrats and Republicans, and for a small group of senators to refuse to caucus with either party. If they thereby deprived either party of a majority, they would have the leverage to shape the Senate’s rules and agenda, since essentially the only ways the body could get anything done would be either for Democrats and Republicans to work together against them, or for either or both parties to negotiate with them.

The last time I saw an opportunity for something like that to happen was during in the Biden administration, when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was being routinely vilified not only by the left but by mainstream Democrats for not responding “how high?” whenever Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said “jump.” Between Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (who left the Democratic Party but continued to caucus with it), Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who has won reelection without the support of the Republican Party) and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah (the only Republican to vote to convict President Trump after both of his impeachments), it seemed to me that there was a core bipartisan group of senators who could have gotten together and, at least temporarily, put partisan control of the chamber out of practical reach for either party, and use that leverage to change how the chamber operated. I last wrote about this idea here, on the occasion of Romney’s retirement.

Precisely because it would have been composed of sitting senators, such a group would have had the advantages of name-recognition, fundraising connections, and substantial in-state support to carry them through at least one election cycle and actually win as independents. But that same fact also militated against their making such a move. These senators came up through a partisan system and were identified within their states by their party. Abandoning that party and refusing to caucus with either would not only have possibly confused and angered their supporters, but would have risked forfeiting the influence they had through committee assignments and such to advance their state’s interests, gambling that known influence on the hope that they would ultimately gain more power by negotiating from a greater distance as true independents. I understood why none of them wanted to take that gamble.

I also understood that any move of that sort would have been viewed by voters, rightly, as a maneuver by insiders rather than a genuine break with the system as it exists. This is a problem that centrist parties generally have: whether they articulate views that people support or not, they read as voices of the establishment, the elite, and the status quo. The most successful centrists on a state level, by contrast, are moderate members of the minority party—Democrats in Kentucky, Republicans in Massachusetts—who can put most of their energy into checking the worst instincts of the entrenched establishment of the dominant party in the state legislature. Romney was a governor of this type—but that wasn’t a viable way for him to operate as a senator.

But now there is a slim but real possibility that the balance of power in next Senate could reside with senators who were elected precisely on a platform of making the Senate non-partisan. Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Seth Bodnar in Montana have both promised repeatedly that if elected they will not to caucus with either party. Osborn has nonetheless won the tacit and sometimes active support of Nebraska Democrats, but the more closely he is identified with that party the less chance he has of prevailing in the general election, so he is likely going to reiterate his pledge of independence, and be loathe to break it immediately upon being elected. Bodnar, by contrast, has only irritated Montana Democrats, so there is likely to be a three-way race in that state with highly unpredictable results.

Neither Osborn nor Bodnar is favored to win; the current odds against Osborn in the betting markets are a bit worse than 2:1, and the odds against Bodnar are more like 5:1. The most likely way either of them win is if a huge national wave of rejection of the incumbent party sweeps Democrats into office in Ohio, Texas and Iowa, all states where they are currently modest underdogs. But Senate races can sometimes be idiosyncratic, and races involving a viable Independent are more likely to be so than most. So if Democrats fall short in those three red states I mentioned, while the Independent pitch catches fire in Nebraska and Montana, then the next Senate could look something like this:

That’s the map that would result from Democratic holds in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Georgia and Michigan, Democratic pickups in North Carolina, Maine and Alaska, and Independent victories in Montana and Nebraska, for a 50-48-2 Senate. (The Democratic 50 includes the nominal independents Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, and Angus King, Senator from Maine, both of whom caucus with the Democrats.) If the Independents stuck with their pledge in this scenario, there would be no majority for either party. And if only one of Osborn or Bodnar won, while the other race went to a Republican, the scenario would be the same, only the lone true independent would have no company.

If that did happen, what would happen then? I honestly don’t know—but I very much want to find out. I want to find out what the new Independents actually want—and which party is more prepared to give it to them, and what they will ask for in exchange. I want to find out whether any of what they want involves real reforms in how the Senate operates, or whether they’ll prove happy either to help the plurality party run things while exacting a regular price for their votes or to watch the institution slide into deeper dysfunction as the two large parties prove incapable of cooperation. I want to find out whether true independence has a lasting constituency or whether the folks back home decide they can’t stomach them for being neither flesh nor fowl. And I want to find out whether it sparks imitators in other states.

I’m not optimistic about getting to the point where I actually do find out. But I am at least mildly optimistic about what it would mean if we did get there. For one thing, this is about the only development I could think of that might force Republicans to reconsider their relentless march to the right. The Democratic Party’s brand is absolutely toxic in much of the country, so voters in red areas who aren’t deeply ideological and aren’t satisfied with the direction of the country have no practical way to throw the bums out. But it’s not just the Republicans who need a jolt. The Democratic Party is widely seen as a sclerotic gerontocracy unable or unwilling to rethink anything, and hoping to regain power on the strength of popular anger at an appalling Republican administration. It would be good if they had reason to worry that such anger might have somewhere else to go.

America is afflicted with raging, cross-spectrum political dissatisfaction. Whatever voters actually want—and they really don’t agree about that, to the extent that they even know—they don’t trust the political system as it exists to give it to them. The Republicans have turned themselves into a vehicle for that anti-system feeling from the right—but their performance in office has left voters disgusted and appalled. That’s an opportunity for the Democrats—except that the populist energy in the Democratic Party is largely on the left, and most voters simply aren’t that left-wing. Meanwhile, the center of the party is strongly identified with an establishment that a large percentage of voters still consider incompetent and corrupt. Our political system probably needs some populist energy in the center to provide an alternative to the extremes—but any such energy is unlikely to emerge within the Democratic Party itself, or to thrive if it does.

So if it comes, it’ll have to come from places that have left the Democrats for dead. Places like Nebraska and Montana.