We all remember from our U.S. history books that the 17th Amendment requires Senators to be elected by direct popular vote (instead of being appointed by state governments, as was the case beforehand).
My question: what effect did putting this vote to the masses have on the Senate membership? Did voters after 1913 (when it was passed) elect the same good ol’ boy incumbents into office, or was there some big-time housecleaning to put in the “people’s choices”? The Amendment specifically states that it
but how much turnover was there in the election years right after the Amendment passed?
It appears that there was actually less turnover after than before. At the beginning of the last Congress before the amendment came into effect (the 63d), there were 20 Senators sworn in who were not part of the previous session’s senate. In contrast, in the first Congress after the amendment came into effect (the 64th), there were only 9 new Senators sworn in at the beginning of the session.
Not counting Senators reprsenting Arizona and New Mexico, in the 6 years before the amendment was in effect, 82 new Senators served who had never served before. In the six years after, only 56 brand new senators served. These numbers exclude some Senators who had been Senators before but who were not Senators at the time of their election, but include some Senators appointed by governors to fill vacant seats.
Before the amendment came into force, about half the states already had non-binding referendums in which the voters chose Senators, with the state legislatures usually appointing the voters’ choice.
Oh, and I get my information from a large (1.57 MB) PDF file I downloaded from http://www.senate.gov/learning/brief_28.html