Governors tend to appoint Senators who most resemble voters in the state, rather than ideologues.

For over a century, state governors have had the power to appoint US Senators to vacant seats, a power which runs against the idea of Senators as being democratic representatives. But do governors appoint those with similar ideologies to themselves? In new research which reviewed senate candidates considered by governors to fill vacancies, Christopher Cooper, H. Gibbs Knotts, and Jordan Ragusa find that while they rarely appoint senators from a different party, they tend to skew towards the middle – appointing those who are closest to the ideology of the state’s median voter.