Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial followed a very predictable partisan path in the Senate last week, with Democrats voting to convict and most Republicans voting to acquit. There’s a long list of reasons, but one of them is the increasingly tidy alignment between the Senate and the presidential partisan maps.
It used to be that many states had divided Senate delegations and that presidents won the vote in states represented by the opposite party in the Senate. But the pattern has been in decline for decades, and it has advanced to the point where today, the presidential election and the Senate maps look remarkably similar. CONTINUED
Dante Chinni, NBC News
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