Talk:Classes of United States Senators

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Classes of United States Senators is part of WikiProject U.S. Congress, an attempt to build a comprehensive guide to the United States Congress.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. The options are: "FA", "A", "GA", "B", "Start", "Stub", "List", "Disambiguation", "Template", or "Category."
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale. The options are: "Top", "High", "Mid", and "Low."
???	This article has not yet been assigned a subject. The options are: "Person", "People", "Place", "Thing", and "Event."

Dumb question: when writing about senators, is it proper to use "senators" or "Senators"? I've read that it should be capitalized only when used as a particular senator's title or when referring to the Senate itself. Otherwise, it shouldn't be. But even the Senate's own web site is inconsistent (bottom of [1] compared to [2]). Thanks! wknight94 01:32, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

It appears to me that it's like you said. For example: Senator Johnson, but the senators are... I think. It does appear to be somewhat inconsistant. --Mathwizard1232 19:54, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Extreme imbalance between Class I and Class II

This may be WP:OR and may not be notable, but I was crunching some numbers and the difference between Democratic Senators in Class I and Class II as of January 2007 is 12. This is the largest difference since Hawaii was admitted to the Union.

No difference of Democratic Senators larger than 8 sustained between any 2 classes in the same direction for more than one cycle. Additionally, after a difference greater than 8 occurred between two classes, the next applicable election brought that difference to under 9 each time.

What does this mean for the next 4 years? This means that Chuck Schumer simply has to play defense to maintain the majority and it would be likely that the Democrats will add to their majority, especially if a Republican is elected President in 2008.

I would venture to guess that we should get used to having a Republican President and a Democratic Congress for the next few years. WatchingYouLikeAHawk 21:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The reason for the different kinds of classes??

As a non-american, I'm still left clueless as to why the existence of this different length terms exists. Why not everybody have terms of the same length? Could some text be added in, to explain how and why this unusual situation came about? Mathmo ^Talk

The senators all serve the same length of term - 6 years. However, they are not all elected at once - a third are elected every two years, so those elected in 2006 will face re-election in 2012, but there will be a senate election in 2008 for those who were elected in 2002 and again in 2010 for those elected in 2004. Senators only had different lengths of term at the very begining or if a new state joins in order to get the pattern started. It IS in the article but the explanation of the odd bits gets much more space than the really simple everyday stuff! Esquimo 17:43, 29 July 2007 (UTC)