Gender Parity / Senate races!

As Professor Selig mentioned in class, there are lots of fascinating non-presidential races going on all around the country. This whole business of "flipping the Senate" to turn Democratic is a huge deal, and it's really going to boil down to Senate races in about seven states. I've been following quite a few of them, and it's absolutely fascinating to watch the polls vacillate between R and D on a nearly daily basis.

As we know, the Senate has 100 seats, two for each state, and each senator's term lasts 6 years. Whereas representatives are up for reelection every single two-year term, senators are ranked into three classes that put about one-third of them up for re-election every two years. The current Senate is made up of 46 Dems (technically 45 + Bernie Sanders, an Independent) and 54 Reps, so the GOP controls the Senate. Typically, the president's party loses seats in a midterm election, which happened to a fairly damaging extent in 2014, when the Democrats lost control of the Senate.

In the 2016 election, all 34 senators in "Class 3" are up for reelection. If the Democrats want to flip the Senate, they'll need to secure 51 seats, some way or another. Let's see the breakdown of what's likely to happen (here's a fun interactive map):

• 30 Republican senators are not up for reelection, and they're fairly likely to win 14 of the seats that are up for reelection, giving the GOP a safe total of 44.
  
• 34 Democratic and 2 D-leaning independent senators are not up for reelection, and they're fairly likely to win 9 of the seats that are up for reelection, giving the Dems a safe total of 45.
  
• This leaves us with 11 contested or toss-up races. Dems need to win 6/11 to flip the Senate, or Republicans need to win 7/11 to maintain control.
  
• Nevada: Senate minority leader Harry Reid is retiring, and hand-picked a successor, former AG of Nevada Catherine Cortez Masto. This one flips almost every week, Masto against Republican Joe Heck.
  
• Arizona: My home state and an election I am heavily invested in! Guess who's up—the one, the only, John McCain, against longtime U.S. Representative, Democratic Ann Kirkpatrick. Ann has represented Arizona's District 1, a huge area that encompasses many low-income, Native American, and minority areas, and she's done a great job at it. She's a rather center-left candidate, which makes her appeal to more than just hard Dems, but John McCain is a beloved Arizona institution. He's leading by a lot right now, but we'll just have to see!
  
• Wisconsin: Dems have a lot of hope to gain a seat here, with Russ Feingold (D) against Ron Johnson (R).
  
• Missouri: Democrat and current Missouri SecState Jason Kander is challenging incumbent Republican Roy Blunt. Dems probably won't have a lot of luck here, since MO is usually red in federal elections and is a fairly strong Trump state right now. Still, the fact that this is even a tossup election is pretty remarkable!
  
• Illinois: Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat and current U.S. Representative (and the first disabled woman in Congress - she was injured while serving as a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War) is running against incumbent Mark Kirk (R).
  
• Indiana: Republican senator Dan Coats is retiring, so the former Democrat governor of Indiana, Evan Bayh, wants to step in to replace him. However, current U.S. Representative Todd Young (R) has received lots of money from outside groups to challenge Bayh. This one has been a tossup only since September, when Bayh was clearly leading before that.
  
• Ohio: Although it's fairly clear now that Rob Portman, the Republican incumbent, is going to win the Ohio seat by about 16 points, he and Democrat Ted Strickland were basically neck and neck in June and July.
  
• Pennsylvania: Incumbent Republican Pat Toomey against Democrat Katie McGinty. This one's really close, but an interesting facet that might give McGinty the lead is that Clinton has a five point lead in PA.
  
• North Carolina: Team Clinton is heavily funding former ACLU lawyer Democrat Deborah Ross, who is facing off against incumbent Republican Richard Burr.
  
• Florida: Guess who could potentially be losing in Senate seat this year? That's right, it's Marco Rubio! Current Democrat Representative Patrick Murphy is challenging him, but it's not likely that Rubio will be defeated.
  
• New Hampshire: This is a fascinating race because it's the only tossup contest between two women! Incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte faces current Democratic Governor of NH, Maggie Hassan. When I was talking about races that keep flipping back and forth almost on a daily basis, I was basically talking about this one. 

One thing that I've noticed when researching and following these races is that there are several women up for election. It was even kind of historic when California's Senate race came down to two female Democrats, even though California has had women senators for a long time now. I did a little bit of searching on women in the Senate and found this thought-provoking yet ultimately disheartening article from Five Thirty Eight about gender parity in the Senate. There are currently 20 female senators, but even with current growth rates being exponential, 538 predicts that gender parity will probably occur around 2043. Sad! 

P.S. Does anyone know the name of the first female senator? 

(I didn't! "The first woman senator, Rebecca Felton, served in 1922 (for a single day), but the first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway in 1932." - from Wikipedia.)