Today’s Question: Who does a U.S. senator represent?

Senators represent all the people of their state. Each state has two senators who are elected by citizens of their state.

But that was not originally the case, nor is it that simple, especially with so much money involved in winning a Senate campaign.

Senators were not always elected by voters. The 17th Amendment gave that power to the people in 1912 after decades of senators being selected by state legislators. The amendment was one of several – including the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th – spearheaded by progressives who shifted constitutional theory away from what the framers envisioned to one that better democratized American politics at the time, said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service.

At the time of the 17th Amendment, there was a lot of concern about corruption within state legislatures, Clayton said. After the Civil War, senatorial candidates were campaigning for state legislative candidates through “public canvass” in an attempt to get legislators who might elect them into the Senate into the legislature. The amendment was an attempt to hinder the corruption of state legislatures that were controlled by big-money interests like railroad and mining corporations.

“Progressives wanted to reform this primarily to remove some of the corruption of state legislatures in the control of the U.S. Senate, but also to deal with some of the dysfunction created by a closely divided electorate and closely held elections,” he said. “And that’s what the 17th Amendment represents. It’s about democratizing American politics.”

Senators have to weigh the interests of the people in their state and the best interests for the country, said Travis Ridout, professor at Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs. The federal government has the ability to regulate gas prices, and state citizens would probably like that, but lowering prices might increase gas consumption and the ill consequences of climate change. These are the dilemmas senators can face.

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Spokesman-Review

Washington voters will soon decide whether to elect their first Democratic secretary of state in six decades or, instead, send a longtime county auditor to be the state’s first nonpartisan chief elections officer.

Republicans were shut out of the state’s top-two primary in August, which sent current Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and nonpartisan Pierce County Auditor Julie Anderson to the general election.

Hobbs was appointed by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee last November to replace Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman once she took a key election security job in the Biden administration. While his appointment marked the first time a Democrat held the office since the mid-1960s, Hobbs has not yet faced voters, so November’s election will determine who serves the last two years of Wyman’s term.

“It’s obviously a sea change for the office given the fact that it’s been in Republican hands for so long,” said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy at Washington State University. Where voters will land this year, he said, “is just very hard to predict.”

Clayton said adding to the uncertainty was the write-in campaign of Republican Rep. Brad Klippert, whose name won’t appear on the ballot but who has been endorsed by the state Republican Party and could potentially pull enough votes to make a difference in a tight race between Hobbs and Anderson. Unlike Wyman, who lauded the state’s election system and security, Klippert is among those who have echoed election fraud conspiracies and wants to do away with the state’s mail voting system and require in-person voting.

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SFGate
KOMO News