Not any more, it isn't. It's more like 47/53 with only 15 percent of voters self-idetifying as solidly liberal and about 30 percent self-identifying as solidly conservative. That's a reversal in numbers over the past 25 years. And it's a trend that shows every tendency to continue to the right.
Consider that fact that if only 10 to 15 percent more blacks were to switch sides, the Democrats would likely never win another presidential election. The Democrats' base support is unnaturally brittle and overly reliant on the loyalty of a few discrete blocs such as black voters. But blacks oppose the gay rights agenda by an even greater percentage than do white Republicans. By continuing to resist the gay rights agenda conservative Republicans are emphasizing a natural solidarity and alliance with the black community and giving blacks an alternative path to influence and power that is more in line with blacks' more conservative social values.
The Senate is interesting because each state gets 2 senators regardless of population. Wyoming has the same number of Senators as California even though California has has much more influence in driving the popular vote towards a 50/50 split.
I realized that this is a very big simplification, but how many of the 50 states voted Republican and how many of them voted Democrat? Multiply by 2 to get how Rs and Ds there would be in the Senate if each state's Senators perfectly matched how they voted in the Presidential race.
No, having a few extra seats in the Senate is not abberant. Liberals have succeeded in parity in the US by shutting down all other voices where they are dominant (MSM, academia, HR departments, and big cities). People trapped in those environments adopt liberalism because they are simply ignorant about anything else. But the problem is that in creating such an environment, they have turned off the rest of everyone else. As a result, liberalism is geographically confined to zones where they exceed 90% of the population. Outside those areas, they have no reach. Hence, the blue v red map.
The states which are very, very red, where a candidate MUST be pro-life and anti-gay-marriage to survive. Even the Democrats claim to be pro-life and anti-gay-marriage. Residents of these states are increasingly furious at how politicians claim to support their views, but somehow baby-slaughterers and perverts keep winning the day. They are starting to demand more from the people who claim to be pro-life, such as Tommy-boy Daschle. Even though they contain only 1/3rd of America's population, they are represented by 48 Senators.
13 more states are "purple," like Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. In these states, large cities vie with outlying regions for control, with suburbs as the middle ground. Many of these states tend to be socially conservative, but a coalition of union-supporters, blacks, and urban liberals keep the states competitive for Democrats.
Any 13 states are truly blue. They include a New England, a handful of megastates (NJ, NY, IL, CA), and a bunch of micro-states (HI, VT, ME, DE, RI).
This means Republicans would naturally control about 60-62 Senate seats, even in a 50-50 country. This is not an abherration; the founding fathers intended to prevent megastates from imposing their will on smaller states, and modern conservativism is a response to exactly that. The reason that Republicans do not control that many seats is not that extremists have proven distateful to "purple-state" moderates. Republicans control about half of the purple-state seats. Rather, it is because the current political realignment is still rather new, and there are still TEN Democrats, mostly liberals, in strongly red states. (NV, NDx2, SD, AR, LA, MT, NE, WV, FL*). Meanwhile, there are only three Republicans, all RINOs, in blue states (MEx2, RI).
THEREFORE: accentuating the differences between the parties benefits the Republicans.
(*I list Florida as a red state very hesitantly, but I do so because the state is so overwhelmingly Republican at the state level. One could readily quabble with designating it, and WV, as red states. On the other hand, one could quabble with designating Michigan, Washington and Maine as blue states.)
What are you on crack? The Democrats (plus Jeffords) already control 18 out of 33 seats. You really think they are going to win 23 out of 33 contests, in mostly red states, with a line-up of aging has-beens, including probably several more retirements?