By Tim Oren
Session 2026: The Senate Takes Shape
With only seven divided votes on record, there’s a lot of stacked, duplicate voting patterns, but the Senate map has assumed its typical shape:
I’m pushing this out a bit early so I can show the vote on S1247, the weaker of the two eVerify bills:
This is an interesting and atypical alliance pattern. This bill exempts many of the worst abusers of cheap migrant labor who dumps costs on the community. It’ll be interested to compare when/if a stronger bill from the House makes its way to the Senate.
The House has been voting up a comparative storm, and its map is settling to the usual shape, somewhat compressed so I can fit in Steve Berch, out in the cometary halo.
Jack Nelsen, having announced his retirement, has abandoned pretense and is voting right along with the Democrats. Meanwhile, D-adjacent Lori McCann will be trying to switch to the Senate before Colton Bennett cooks her. A bit of a pattern?
The feature vote for the House is H0528, permitting directed blood donations and transfusions, a health autonomy issue.
This bill is being lobbied against by the Red Cross, an NGO trying to stop a challenge to its de facto middleman monopoly on whole blood. The ‘nay’ votes here may give you a clue as to who is opposing on principle, or perhaps is susceptible to that lobbying, take your pick. We also see a rare Steve Berch vote with the majority!
The next couple of weeks may give us floor votes on bills relating to illegal immigration, if they aren’t suffocated in committee. Stay tuned!
Afterword: About the Map Axes
The X and Y axes on the maps don’t have plain English definitions. They are automatically generated to best ‘explain’ the voting alliances in divided roll calls in the legislative houses. You can see them compared to various ‘scorecards’ in a previous Chronicle article. If this session evolves as ones before (I’ve retcon’ed maps for 2025 back through 2023, they all end up similar) you will usually end up with big spenders towards the left of the map, and cultural/liberty issues will sort with more libertarian towards the upper right and more statist/authoritarians to the low left. That’s not a certainty, but is likely given that we’re looking at more-or-less the same people arguing over more-or-less similar policy territory.
About Tim Oren
Tim Oren retired to Idaho after a 30 year career in Silicon Valley. Here he gardens, home-brews, teaches kids to shoot, and has applied his well-aged statistics degree to subjects such as educational funding and results, Idaho legislative race targeting, and now legislators' voting patterns. He is a contributor to the Idaho Freedom Foundation and a number of Idaho candidates.
