34 of the 96 seats in the United States Senate 49 seats needed for a majority
Majority party
Minority party
Leader
Henry Cabot Lodge[a]
Oscar Underwood
Party
Republican
Democratic
Leader since
March 4, 1919
April 27, 1920
Leader's seat
Massachusetts
Alabama
Seats before
49
47
Seats after
59
37
Seat change
10
10
Seats up
15
19
Races won
25
9
Results of the elections: Democratic hold Republican gain Republican hold No election
Majority Leader before election
Henry Cabot Lodge[a]
Republican
Elected Majority Leader
Henry Cabot Lodge[a]
Republican
The 1920 United States Senate elections were elections for the United States Senate that coincided with the presidential election of Warren G. Harding. The 32 seats of Class 3 were contested in regular elections, and special elections were held to fill vacancies. Democrat Woodrow Wilson's unpopularity allowed Republicans to win races across the country, winning ten seats from the Democrats and providing them with an overwhelming 59-to-37 majority. The Republican landslide was so vast that Democrats lost over half of the seats that were contested this year and failed to win a single race outside the South.
Since the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, these elections were the closest when the winning party in almost every Senate election mirrored the winning party for their state in the presidential election, with Kentucky being the only Senate race to not mirror their presidential result. No other Senate election cycle in a presidential year would come close to repeating this feat until 2016, in which the result of every Senate race mirrored the corresponding state's result in the presidential election. Coincidentally, that election cycle involved the same class of Senate seats, Class 3.[1]
This is one of only five occasions where 10 or more Senate seats changed party in an election, with the other occasions being in 1932, 1946, 1958, and 1980.
As of 2024, the 59 seats held after this election cycle remains the highest number of seats that the Republican Party has held as the result of an election cycle. This number rose to 60, the highest number of seats the Republicans have ever held, after Democrat senator Josiah O. Wolcott of Delaware accepted an offer from Republican governor William D. Denney to become Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, allowing Denney to name Republican T. Coleman du Pont to replace Wolcott, a seat du Pont held until the next election, in which both a special election was held for the remainder of the term and a regular election was held as the seat was normally up then, both of which du Pont lost narrowly to Democrat Thomas F. Bayard Jr. In addition, the 22-seat majority is the largest majority that the Republicans have achieved in any election since.
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^Enten, Harry (November 10, 2016). "There Were No Purple* States On Tuesday". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved August 19, 2020.
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