Originally posted on October 1, 2020

Trump likes to blame anyone else for whatever problems exist. A common blamed group is the Democratic party. A neutral observer might ask which party has held the balance of power in, say, the last 20 years. So I spent a couple of hours (Wikipedia is great for this sort of research) putting together a chart of which party controlled which branch of government, with the Senate and House each counting as half of the legislative branch.

The resulting chart is below, along with the numbers I used to color the columns. It is pretty obvious which party has been in power the bulk of the last 20 years, and it isn’t the much-blamed Democrats.

For the numerically-inclined, there are 60 colored “squares” above (20 years times 3 branches). Only 15 of those squares are blue, the other 45 are red. Every single branch has had a larger Republican presence. Democrats have never controlled all three branches, while the Republicans have during 8 of the 20 years.

Many of us Americans think the country is getting worse, and I am always a little surprised when they can’t figure out who has held the balance of power since 2000, and who might be responsible for the decline. Trump is simply the latest in a long line of Republican failures.