2006 United States Senate elections

Based on Wikipedia: 2006 United States Senate elections

On the evening of November 7, 2006, something happened that hadn't occurred in over half a century: the United States Senate found itself without a majority party. When the dust settled from that night's elections, Democrats and Republicans each controlled exactly 49 seats. The two remaining senators were independents—and where they chose to sit would determine who ran the chamber.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

Republicans had entered the election cycle holding 55 of the 100 Senate seats, a comfortable cushion built over years of steady gains. But 2006 became a political earthquake, a "wave election" that swept Democrats into power across the country. Not a single congressional or gubernatorial seat held by a Democrat fell to a Republican that year. The wave only moved in one direction.

The Math That Made History

To understand why the 2006 Senate elections mattered so much, you need to understand how the Senate works. Unlike the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are up for election every two years, the Senate staggers its elections. Senators serve six-year terms, and roughly one-third of the seats—called a "class"—come up for election every two years.

In 2006, it was Class 1's turn. Thirty-three seats were on the ballot.

Democrats needed to flip six Republican seats while losing none of their own to take control. That's a tall order in any election. Incumbent senators have enormous advantages: name recognition, fundraising networks, the ability to deliver federal money to their states, and the simple fact that voters tend to stick with what they know.

But 2006 wasn't any election. President George W. Bush's approval ratings had cratered, dragged down by the unpopular war in Iraq, the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and a series of corruption scandals involving Republican members of Congress. The political environment couldn't have been worse for the party in power.

Democrats ran the table. They defeated Republican incumbents in Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Virginia. They held onto open seats in Maryland and Minnesota where retiring Democrats could have created vulnerabilities. Republicans managed to hold just one open seat, in Tennessee, where the retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist had served.

Here's a remarkable statistic: as of 2022, this remains the most recent midterm election in which none of the open seats—meaning seats where the incumbent wasn't running—flipped to the other party. Usually, open seats are where the action is. But in 2006, the action was everywhere.

The Independents Who Held the Keys

After the votes were counted, the Democratic Party technically controlled only 49 seats. Republicans also held 49. Two senators sat outside the party structure entirely.

One was Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the self-described democratic socialist who had served in the House of Representatives as an independent for sixteen years before winning his Senate race. Sanders replaced Jim Jeffords, another Vermont independent who had famously left the Republican Party in 2001—a defection that briefly handed Democrats control of the Senate during Bush's first term.

The other independent was Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and his story is one of the strangest in modern American political history.

Both independents chose to caucus with the Democrats, giving the party the 51 votes it needed to organize the chamber. This was critical because Vice President Dick Cheney, as President of the Senate, would break any 50-50 tie in favor of Republicans. Democrats needed that extra vote.

For the first time since January 1955, no party held an outright majority of Senate seats. Control depended entirely on which party the independents chose to align with.

The Lieberman Saga

Joe Lieberman had been a Democratic senator from Connecticut since 1989. In 2000, Al Gore selected him as his running mate, making Lieberman the first Jewish candidate on a major party's presidential ticket. He was, by any conventional measure, a Democratic Party institution.

But Lieberman had a problem: the Iraq War.

While most Democrats had turned against the war by 2006, Lieberman remained one of its staunchest defenders. He supported President Bush's policies so vocally and so frequently that critics began calling him "Bush's favorite Democrat." For the party's base, which had grown increasingly antiwar and increasingly frustrated with what they saw as Democratic timidity, Lieberman became a symbol of everything wrong with Washington's bipartisan establishment.

Enter Ned Lamont, a wealthy cable television executive and former local official from Greenwich. Lamont announced in March 2006 that he would challenge Lieberman in the Democratic primary—a bold move against a three-term incumbent and former vice-presidential nominee.

Early polls showed Lieberman with a 46-point lead. Surely the challenger was tilting at windmills.

Except the race kept tightening. Lamont ran a campaign fueled by antiwar activists and the emerging "netroots"—the politically engaged bloggers and online organizers who were becoming a force in Democratic politics. His message was simple: Lieberman had sided with Bush too many times on too many issues. Connecticut Democrats deserved someone who would actually oppose the Republican president.

A photograph became central to the campaign's iconography. During the 2005 State of the Union address, President Bush had greeted Lieberman with what opponents characterized as a kiss on the cheek. The image circulated endlessly online, a visual argument that the senator was too cozy with an administration most Democrats despised.

Lieberman fought back with his own advertisements, trying to connect himself with the still-popular former President Bill Clinton and portraying Lamont as a single-issue candidate with nothing to offer beyond opposition.

Lamont responded with what became one of the cycle's most memorable ads. A foreboding narrator intones: "Meet Ned Lamont. He can't make a decent cup of coffee, he's a bad karaoke singer, and he has a messy desk." Then Lamont himself appears on screen: "Aren't you sick of political attack ads that insult your intelligence? Senator Lieberman, let's stick to issues and pledge to support whoever wins the Democratic primary."

It was clever, self-deprecating, and it highlighted exactly what Lieberman refused to do: commit to supporting the Democratic nominee.

The Primary and Its Aftermath

On August 8, 2006, Connecticut Democrats delivered a verdict that shocked the political establishment. Lamont won the primary with 52 percent of the vote to Lieberman's 48 percent. An incumbent senator, a former vice-presidential nominee, had been rejected by his own party's voters.

In his concession speech, Lieberman made clear he wasn't going away. He had already collected signatures to appear on the November ballot as the candidate of a new party he'd created for precisely this purpose: Connecticut for Lieberman.

The move created an awkward situation for Democratic leaders. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Chuck Schumer, issued a statement congratulating Lamont and pledging their support. But Lieberman had powerful friends in Washington, and many establishment Democrats were privately hoping he would win the general election and return to their caucus.

The Republican nominee, Alan Schlesinger, became an afterthought—which was convenient for Lieberman, since it meant he could compete for Republican votes without a serious opponent on that flank. Schlesinger's campaign had effectively ended in July when it was revealed he'd been gambling under a fake name to avoid being identified as a card counter at casinos.

In November, Lieberman won convincingly with about 50 percent of the vote to Lamont's 40 percent and Schlesinger's 10 percent. Exit polls told the story of his coalition: he won 70 percent of Republican voters, 54 percent of independents, and still managed to hold onto 33 percent of Democrats. Every county in Connecticut went for the man who was no longer his party's nominee.

Lieberman returned to Washington and caucused with the Democrats, preserving their majority. But the episode left scars. Some Democratic aides told reporters that Lieberman might be stripped of his seniority for running against his party's nominee. That threat never materialized—Lieberman was too valuable as the 51st vote—but the relationship remained tense throughout his final term.

The 2006 Connecticut Senate race became a template for future ideological insurgencies within both parties. It demonstrated that primary voters, when sufficiently motivated, could topple even the most entrenched incumbents. The Tea Party movement that would reshape Republican politics four years later drew lessons from what the netroots had accomplished against Lieberman.

The Races That Flipped

While Connecticut produced the drama, other states produced the Democratic majority. Six Republican incumbents went down to defeat that November, each loss telling its own story about why 2006 became a Democratic year.

In Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum—one of the most prominent social conservatives in the Senate and the third-ranking Republican in leadership—lost by 18 points to state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. Santorum had been a polarizing figure who seemed increasingly out of step with his moderate-trending state. His defeat wasn't close.

In Ohio, Mike DeWine fell to Sherrod Brown, a liberal congressman, by 12 points. Ohio had been ground zero for Republican scandals involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Governor Bob Taft, who had been convicted of ethics violations. The state's Republican brand was badly damaged.

In Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee—ironically, one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate—lost to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. Chafee had voted against authorizing the Iraq War, opposed the Bush tax cuts, and supported abortion rights. None of it mattered. Rhode Island voters wanted a Democrat, and Chafee's party affiliation was disqualifying no matter how he actually voted.

Montana and Missouri produced closer contests. In Montana, Democrat Jon Tester—a flat-topped organic farmer missing three fingers from a childhood accident with a meat grinder—defeated incumbent Conrad Burns by fewer than 3,000 votes. Burns had been implicated in the Abramoff scandal and had made a series of embarrassing gaffes, including comments about firefighters that alienated voters during a difficult wildfire season.

In Missouri, Claire McCaskill defeated Jim Talent by roughly 50,000 votes, about 2 percentage points. A controversial ballot measure on stem cell research helped drive Democratic turnout, and Talent's opposition to the measure hurt him in the moderate suburbs of St. Louis and Kansas City.

But the closest race of all—the one that determined Senate control—came in Virginia.

Virginia: The Tipping Point

Virginia's Senate race was supposed to be a sleepy affair. George Allen, the incumbent Republican, was popular, well-funded, and widely considered a frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. His Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, was a former Republican himself—Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy who had drifted from the party over the Iraq War.

Then Allen handed his opponents a gift.

At a campaign rally in rural Virginia in August, Allen noticed a young man in the crowd who was tracking his campaign for Webb. The tracker, S.R. Sidarth, was of Indian descent. Allen pointed at him and said: "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere... Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

The word "macaca" is a slur used against people of African descent in some European countries. Whether Allen knew this—he claimed he made the word up on the spot—hardly mattered. The video went viral, one of the first political moments to spread uncontrollably through the then-young YouTube. Allen's image as an affable good ol' boy transformed into something uglier.

More damaging revelations followed. Reporters dug into Allen's past and found former acquaintances who said he had used racial slurs in private. His campaign struggled to contain the damage.

Webb, meanwhile, ran as a different kind of Democrat—a military veteran and cultural conservative who opposed the Iraq War from a hawkish rather than dovish perspective. His campaign biography emphasized his service in Vietnam and his family's long military tradition. He argued he could better support the troops precisely because he opposed sending them into a war he considered misguided.

On election night, the race was too close to call. Webb led by fewer than 10,000 votes out of more than 2.3 million cast. Under Virginia law, Allen could have requested a recount. For more than a week, the nation waited to learn which party would control the Senate.

On November 15, Allen conceded. Webb's margin of victory was 0.39 percent—under four-tenths of one percent. As of 2024, this remains the closest margin for any race that determined which party controlled the Senate.

What It Meant

The 2006 Senate elections ended a streak of Republican dominance that had begun in 1994. For the first time in twelve years, Democrats would chair committees, set the agenda, and control what legislation came to the floor. Harry Reid of Nevada became Majority Leader, replacing Bill Frist of Tennessee.

But the Democratic majority was razor-thin—the thinnest possible, in fact. Any two Democratic senators could tank legislation by threatening to withhold their votes. Joe Lieberman in particular held enormous leverage, since he could theoretically switch his allegiance to the Republicans at any moment. The party had to keep him happy.

The elections also demonstrated something that would become increasingly apparent in subsequent cycles: the Senate map was diverging from presidential politics. Several states that regularly voted Democratic in presidential elections—like Nebraska, where Democrat Ben Nelson held his seat—would become increasingly Republican in Senate races. And states trending Democratic would eventually stop sending Republicans to the Senate at all.

Consider this remarkable fact: 2006 was the last time a Democrat won a Senate election in Nebraska. Ben Nelson retired in 2012, and no Democrat has won statewide there since. It was also the last time a Democrat did not win a Senate seat in Connecticut—because Lieberman, technically an independent, won instead of Lamont.

Perhaps most significantly, 2006 was the only midterm election between 1990 and 2022 in which Democrats gained Senate seats. The Senate's structural bias toward rural, less populated states—each state gets two senators regardless of population—has made it increasingly difficult for Democrats to hold majorities. Their coalition is concentrated in states that were already solidly Democratic, while Republicans have locked up vast numbers of smaller states.

The Class 1 senators elected in 2006 would serve until January 2013, many of them through the financial crisis of 2008, the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and the Tea Party wave that cost Democrats their House majority that same year. Several would face their own difficult reelections in 2012, when the political environment had shifted yet again.

But on that November night in 2006, none of that was yet written. Democrats celebrated a victory that had seemed unlikely just months earlier. Republicans absorbed a defeat that ended careers and ambitions. And two independent senators—one a democratic socialist from Vermont, the other a Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut—held the balance of power in the world's most powerful legislative body.

The Senate, as it so often does, reflected the contradictions and complexities of the nation it served.