Mildly Interesting

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Kamala Harris has cast more tie-breaking votes in the Senate than any VP in history (33) (ballotpedia.org)

submitted 4 months ago by ccunning to c/mildlyinteresting

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While her two closest competitors John C. Calhoun (31) and John Adam’s (29) aren’t far off, it took them both two terms to reach those numbers.

The most any fellow one term VP had was 19, achieved by George M. Dallas (1845-1849).

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Doesn't that just mean there were more ties due to an evenly divided Senate?

[–] ccunning 46 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I bet if you sort VPs by tie-breaking votes you’ll be able to find the most evenly divided senates. I almost added this to my post but didn’t want to do any more research or compromise the mildness of the interest of the post 🙃

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate your dedication to not being too dedicated.

[–] yetiftw 4 points 4 months ago

a very fine line to tread indeed

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Yeah, it's not a huge personal achievement in her part, just a quirk of her term.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It does. Joe Biden was VP for a lot longer than Harris, but according to the table linked in the OP, he cast 0 tie-breaking votes; if you look at Senate composition during that time, you can see that there was always a very clear majority for one party. Since 2017 it's always been fairly close to 50-50, so there needed only to be a few (if any) senators breaking from their party to create ties, so Pence and Harris got plenty of opportunities to cast tie-breaking votes.