Ellis and King preface the substance of their response by suggesting that Wirls “seeks a straw man,” and that “it is unfortunate that Wirls chose to present his evidence in terms of a critique rather than as a supplement to previous studies,” thereby pushing them “onto the defensive.” I do not think I have violated any rules of academic cricket and I am certainly not addressing a straw man. In their original article, “Partisan Advantage and Constitutional Change,” King and Ellis elaborate one piece of empirical evidence (the systematic partisan bias and its reversal following the Seventeenth Amendment) and infer from this a plausible hypothesis (partisan competition as the primary cause of the amendment). My article attempts to show, first, that the bias was not caused by the process suggested by King and Ellis; second, that the partisan competition hypothesis is not clearly supported by several other forms of evidence; and finally, by contrast, that intra-party divisions were more obvious and influential in the fate of the amendment than was inter-party competition. My article, whether wholly correct or not, addresses directly the central empirical claims they make in their article and the direct hypothesis they draw from the evidence (to quote them directly): “The Senate, we believe, was freed from state legislative control primarily to enhance the Democratic party's ability to place its agents in office”Ronald F. King and Susan Ellis, “Partisan Advantage and Constitutional Change: The Case of the Seventeenth Amendment,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 92. In response, I ask, Where's the straw man?