The Senate's 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than its 54 Republicans

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25. This is a particularly silly statistic

Comparing how many votes Democratic winners received to how many votes Republican winners received is silly. It suggests that Bernie Sanders win in 2012 by 46 percent was somehow less legitimate that Orrin Hatch's win by 35 percent, because in terms of vote total, Bernie got 207,000 votes and Hatch got nearly 600,000 votes.

It also doesn't take into consideration the fact that in presidential election years, turnout is much higher than in "off-years".

Indeed, if you look at the number of votes received by the Senate candidates of both parties over the past three cycles (not just the number received by the winners), the repubs have gotten more votes than Democrats in two of the three, but the Democrats have a margin overall because the margin in 2012 was so large. More specifically, in 2010 repub candidates got 2.7 million more votes than Democratic candidates and in 2014 repub candidate for Senate got around 3 million more votes than Democratic candidates. But the Democrats crushed the repubs in 2012 by an aggregate 10.8 million, meaning that despite losing the aggregate vote in 2 out of the three cycles and losing 54 out of 100 races, the Democrats received over 5 million more votes than the Republicans in the three cycles.

Which is just another way of showing that its a silly statistic.