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Classes of US Senators

The three classes of US Senators, each including (since Alaska statehood in 1959, and until another two states are admitted to statehood) 33 or 34 Senators, are a means used by the US Senate for describing the schedules of Senate seats' elections, and of the expiration of the terms of office of the Senators holding the respective seats.

The US Constitution specifies staggered 6-year terms for Senators, and there are special provisions for getting a new state into a situation that makes that pattern continue automatically:

(This means at least one of a new state's first pair of Senators has a term of less than six years, and one term is either two or four years shorter than the other.)

(This offers a trivia question about the assignment of Senate seats to states admitted or readmitted during the Civil War and the Reconstruction period following it, in view of seats previously assigned to states initially in rebellion and then awaiting so-called "reconstruction" of their democratic institutions. Chance may have made the classes lopsided, and if so, a decision must have been made on whether to use new and readmitted states' Senate classes to reduce such an imbalance as quickly as possible, and whether therefore Confederate states' Senators' classes were, upon readmission, the same as, or in some cases different from, those before secession. Wikipedia offers the means of researching this.)

As of 2003 and 2004:

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