Expulsions in U.S. Politics — And How George Santos’ Removal Could Affect the U.S. House Republican Majority
On December 1, 2023, the U.S. House took the highly unusual step of expelling one of its members. George Santos — who has been in hot water for allegations of false biographical claims, misuse of campaign funds, and forged documents, among other things — was removed from Congress by his colleagues by a 311–114 vote, including 112 Republicans. The last U.S. House Representative to be expelled was James Traficant in 2002, who was convicted of multiple offenses including conspiracy to commit bribery and defrauding the U.S.
Today’s post will dive into expulsions elsewhere in U.S. elected offices and take a more in-depth look at the Santos situation and what its potential effects are.
The Rarity of Expulsion
It’s extremely rare for a member of Congress to be expelled. This is largely due to the Constitutional requirement of a 2/3rds vote of the chamber the member is a part of to support expulsion, meaning a large bipartisan response is necessary. It also requires a high threshold of wrongdoing due to the seriousness of the consequences. Slightly more common are censures and reprimands, which do not remove members of Congress but express judgment and disapproval of members’ conduct. Still, censures and reprimands have only happened 26 and 11 times, respectively.
Santos was only the sixth member of the U.S. House to ever be expelled. Prior to Traficant and Santos, only one other representative, Michael J. Myers, had been expelled since the Civil War. Other representatives have faced expulsion but either resigned or the efforts to expel them were unsuccessful, such as when ardent slavery supporter Preston Brooks of South Carolina viciously attacked and seriously injured U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the latter derided the institution of slavery and its supporters in the U.S. Senate.
It’s been somewhat more common in the U.S. Senate for one of its own to be expelled than in the U.S. House, though it is by no means a usual occurrence there, either. As of December 2023, 30 U.S. Senators have faced expulsion but only 15 of them have received the punishment, though all but one of those successful expulsions was due to those members’ support for the Confederate rebellion in the Civil War. The only other expulsion in the U.S. Senate was in 1797.
Ballotpedia also has examples of state legislators that have been expelled from their respective chambers. The true number of these occurrences may be nearly if not impossible to figure out (Ballotpedia is careful to note their list is not comprehensive), but it’s by far the best you will find for the state level of government. It’s at least safe to say it is not a common occurrence there, either, though some notable recent instances include Tennessee State Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who were reinstated to those positions by their local governments shortly thereafter.
States may differ in the percentage of their state house or state senate needed to expel one of their members. But the process is going to be more or less similar to that of Congress.
What Happens to Santos’ Seat Now?
When a vacancy in a U.S. House seat occurs in the first session of a Congress, a special election must be called for it. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has set the date for that special election on February 13, 2024.
Predicting special elections is often murkier than for regularly-scheduled elections. You usually have a better sense of what the turnout rate will be and who shows up for the latter because you have comparable results in history to go by. Presidential elections have similar turnout rates to each other, midterms tend to have turnout rates to each other, etc. Obviously, things can and do change, but the history of a district tends to be a strong indicator of what will come in the next election.
Although the boundaries of congressional districts had to change due to mandated redistricting following the U.S. Census — making 2022 the first election under the new district lines — you can sometimes look at how the precincts within districts voted previously, and then add that data to the data for precincts that stayed in the district. For example, if Precinct 114 was not in the district in 2020 but was in 2022, you can still look at how Precinct 114 voted in 2020 to get a sense of how it will look in 2024. Voters in regularly-scheduled general elections often have a specific polling place they are designated for on Election Day.
But a lot of this historical precedent goes out the window with special elections. They’re inherently irregular, meaning we cannot go by normal circumstances. Many of the voters who turn out to regularly-scheduled elections are not going to show up for a special election. Voters who are not as tuned into politics may not know that an election at an unusual time is occurring. Or they might not care. Or something is going on in their lives that is preoccupying them.
Still, the election results from the regular election aren’t completely worthless when it comes to gauging a special election’s future results. So, let’s look at the 2022 results for Santos’ former seat, the 3rd Congressional District of New York.
New York employs an unusual system of voting called fusion voting. Fusion voting systems allow candidates to receive nominations from multiple parties. In New York general elections, you often see the third party known as the Conservative Party also nominate the Republican, while the Working Families Party often also nominates the Democrat. Such was the case for George Santos and his opponent, Democrat Robert Zimmerman, in 2022.
Santos won the election with 53.74% of votes that were counted, which were the votes by party and the scattering votes — not a particularly close election, but far from a blowout. Here, “scattering” votes mean those for various write-in candidates lumped together. “Blank” votes refer to ballots that were cast in the election where voters did not make any choice in this particular race (e.g., they voted on their state legislators but not their U.S. House representative). “Void” votes are those that made a choice in this race but were discounted for one reason or another (e.g., the voter filled out the bubble for their choice on the ballot incorrectly).
Now let’s look at the number of registered voters in the district, both for around the time of the election and close to now. The New York State Board of Elections data for voter enrollment by congressional district appears to only be updated each February and November, at least for the past few years.
We can’t quite tell how many voters may have crossed party lines to vote for the other candidate (e.g., Democrats who may have voted for Santos). And data on turnout rates by party do not appear to be readily available.
However, given that Santos won by about 20,000 votes while there are about 60,000–65,000 more Democrats than Republicans, it’s reasonable to think that Republicans turned out at much better rates than Democrats did. That also depends on how many of these “blank” voters — registered voters that do not have any party affiliation — turned out to vote. But many of these independents do regularly vote Republican or regularly vote Democratic, even if they don’t identify themselves with one party or the other. How much that happens in this congressional district is unclear, but either way, there are a considerable number of “blank” voters in the 3rd congressional district of New York and the state as a whole.
Santos might have also been a beneficiary of what typically happens in a midterm election: The sitting president’s party does not tend to perform well. In the 23 midterm elections that have occurred from 1934 to 2022, the incumbent president’s party has had a net loss of seats 20 times. In 2022, that was Democrat Joe Biden. How much that contributed to Santos’ Republican victory specifically isn’t clear from the get-go, but there is a fair chance that it played a role.
But again, this is a special election. So, it will likely have little resemblance to what happened in the midterm election, regardless of who wins. And unlike the usual process of a primary for a regular election, local political party leaders are choosing who the respective party nominees are, which voters will then pick from. Are voters in the district angry enough at Santos that they will take out their frustrations on the Republican candidate for the special election? Maybe. Polling could give us more of a sense of whether that is the case. But the Republican nominee for the special election will, theoretically, attempt to avoid comparisons to George Santos as much as possible.
Then there are other factors to account for that we just don’t know enough about yet, like who the candidates are and what their financial backing is. However, the previous occupant of the seat, Tom Suozzi, may run for the seat again after an unsuccessful primary challenge to Hochul for the governorship in 2022. He’s already running for it in the regular November 2024 election, and it is being speculated that he will be getting the backing of local Democrats and Hochul.
So, it is hard to fully estimate how the election might turn out. But with an opportunity to cut into the thin Republican majority of the U.S. House, Democrats may pour more money and resources than usual into this seat. In any case, with the special election only a couple months away, it is going to be a quick turnaround for anybody who wants to fill out the rest of Santos’ term.
What are the Wider Ramifications of Santos’ Removal?
Following Santos’ expulsion, Republicans have a 221–213 majority in that chamber. They already couldn’t afford to have that many of their members break from them on wider party priorities, but going from a +9 to +8 seat advantage (which would become a +7 seat advantage if a Democrat wins the special election) makes that margin even closer.
Santos specifically, however, did not considerably impact the legislative process. He recused himself from the congressional assignments he had on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and the Small Business Committee. While he was the sponsor of (i.e., the one who introduced) 40 bills, he never garnered a cosponsor, and the nonpartisan congressional tracker GovTrack rated each individual bill’s change at passage at no more than 24%. (GovTrack’s prognoses for 36 of his 40 sponsored bills at 6% or less.)
What about his impact on other Republican representatives’ bills? One way we can examine this is through VoteView, a resource that measures partisan and ideological leanings of members of Congress.
Below are two tables from Santos’ profile on VoteView. The first table measures his DW-NOMINATE score, which essentially gauges how conservative or liberal a member of Congress based solely on the bills that have come up in a congressional session (as opposed to, say, how a member has described themselves). The second table shows statistics related to his attendance and loyalty to his party on bills.
Accessing his VoteView profile and hovering your cursor over the red bar will show text saying that he is “more conservative than 71% of the 118th House” and “more liberal than 55% of Republicans in the 118th House.” This means that how he votes on bills often resembles how his party votes as a whole, though not considerably often like many of his Republican former colleagues.
His VoteView profile also shows that his total votes cast, attendance, and party loyalty are all below both the median House Republican and the median of the House as a whole. In other words, he has cast fewer votes, attended fewer times, and sides with his party less than at least half of Republicans in the chamber. The same goes for the chamber as a whole.
The VoteView data on Santos’ ideology and his attendance/party loyalty therefore suggest that while he was often in lockstep with his fellow Republicans, there were many more Republicans that sided with the party on votes more often than he did. So, while Santos’ expulsion does make the margin of victory on bills even tighter for House Republicans, it isn’t as detrimental as the expulsion of many other, more loyal Republicans would have been had they been facing the same allegations as he is.
Santos’ expulsion will also likely have little if any effect on other races Republican incumbents are vying in — i.e., it’s doubtful many voters will care enough about whether their incumbent voted to remove Santos from Congress to change their vote one way or another. Santos, for his part, has vowed revenge against those who expelled him. He may try to, for example, put together a PAC that props up primary challengers to those Republicans that voted to remove him from Congress. But whether any sort of electoral threats he makes are credible remains to be seen, especially as he is mired in legal trouble that will cost a lot of time, energy, and money.
At the very least, it benefits the Republican Party more to have expelled Santos than if they kept him around, even if their House majority has shrunk. Regardless of whether any or all of the allegations against him are credible, him keeping his seat would have been a distraction for the party, though he did announce he would not seek re-election in 2024 after the release of the U.S. House ethics report. Now Republicans can shift their focus to propping up a different candidate to try to hold onto the seat.
But as stated earlier, some of Santos’ former supporters may be angry enough that they choose the Democratic candidate this time around, or maybe they sit the election out altogether. Assuming that the winner of the special election runs again for a full term in the November 2024 election, they could gain a key incumbency advantage for 2024. With the partisan majority in the U.S. House as thin as it is — along with a potential swing in the U.S. Senate majority and the presidency up for grabs — the eventual victor in the race for Santos’ former office may just factor into partisan control of not only the U.S. House but the federal government as a whole.
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