Guest post: Basics: How Overrepresented Are Rural and Low-Population States?
by Kenneth Thomas
Guest post: Basics: How Overrepresented Are Rural and Low-Population States?
We all kinda sorta know it: rural and small states are overrepresented in the Senate and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College.This has deep roots in American history, of course: when the United States Constitution was drafted, small states demanded the Senate, with two votes for every state, to guarantee they would not be overwhelmed by the larger states politically. But today, when we have much greater population differences among states than in 1787, this takes on much more anti-democratic significance than it did then. Because each state has two Senators, political changes favoring the middle class are much harder to achieve than if everyone in the country were equally represented, in a mathematical sense, in Congress. Moreover, with the existence of the filibuster (recently challenged in court by Common Cause), the effect of this overrepresentation is substantially magnified. But how big is the effect after the 2010 Census?
Under the Senate’s filibuster rules, 41 Senators can block debate on Senate bills and nomination confirmations. So the first question is what percentage of the 50 states’ population do the 21 smallest states have. The 2010 Census showed the states to have 308.1 million (all quoted figures are subject to slight rounding error) population, with the smallest 21, from Wyoming’s 564,000 to Iowa’s 3 million, having a total of 34.8 million, or just 11.3% of the 50-state population. In theory, Senators representing those states could mount a successful filibuster. Of course, this is unrealistic, since some small states are heavily Democratic, such as Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Delaware. Even Montana currently has two Democratic Senators.
Another way to look at the filibuster is to ask what percentage of the 50-state population is represented by the 41 Republican Senators from the least populous states. The answer takes the actual population of states with any Republican Senators, except Texas (Cornyn and Hutchison), Florida (Rubio), Illinois (Kirk), Pennsylvania (Toomey), and Ohio (Portman). The population of the states represented by the other 41 Republican Senators is 104.7 million, or 34.0% of the population of the 50 states. Thus, states with just a third of the country’s population can block legislation or Presidential nominations. With the recent skyrocketing use of the filibuster in the Senate, this is profoundly undemocratic.
Turning to the Electoral College, we can again see the effect of having a minimum of two Senators regardless of population, which means that each state (and the District of Columbia) has a minimum of three electors in the Electoral College. For example, the Real Clear Politics Electoral College map lists just 11 states and the District of Columbia as likely Obama, whereas 17 states are likely Romney. Even though the likely Obama states have more electoral votes than the likely Romney states (161 to 131), 6 of the Democratic states have double-digit electoral votes whereas only two of the Republican states do, underlining how Romney benefits from the overrepresentation of rural states.
Finally, remembering the 2000 election, where President Bush was awarded more electoral votes despite losing the popular vote nationally, we can ask what the minimum percentage of population for the 50 states plus DC is needed to win the Electoral College. To answer this question, I tallied from the bottom to see how many states were required to top 270 electoral votes. According to Wikipedia (as I tell my students, only a potentially reliable source for non-controversial information, like this), you have to have New Jersey to top 270, but it actually takes you to 282. So I subtracted three Democratic states (DE, VT, and DC) with 3 electoral votes as well as Montana’s 3 electoral votes (since it’s the most competitive of the remaining states with 3 EVs) to get down to 270. The 37 remaining states have only 45% of the nation’s population eligible to elect the President. Yet theoretically they could do just that.
This post has merely scratched the surface of the deep historical and constitutional questions that have led to Wyoming’s 564,000 people having as many Senators as California’s 37.7 million. The rural bias of the Senate and Electoral College make major political changes difficult to achieve, yet it is even more difficult to imagine that they could possibly be fundamentally altered, especially the Senate. Still, it is worth reflecting on these imbalances in order to understand the shortcomings that exist in American democracy.
crossposted with Middle Class Political Economist
Kenneth,
For the national election all you say may be true, but in reality doesn’t effect the election. For all practical purposes your vote for President in California, New York, and Texas will have zero effect. The first two will go solidly Dem and the last solidly Rep. You are just as much disenfrancised as Rep voting in San Francisco as a Dem voting in Austin. Everything I read says its going to come down to Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Colorado (YMMV). Other than Colorado all are fairly populous states and all politically split.
As you pointed out, the little states seem to be roughly evenly split in the Senate. So again the gripe doesn’t really pan out.
And lastly, its was a definitely designed part of the US Government to prevent, or make very difficult, “major political change’. That’s a feature, not a bug as the saying goes. And FDR managed it, as did numerous other Presidents. Just becuase Obama is incompetant isn’t an indictment of the system.
And never forget we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Just becuase Obama and the Dems have been much less able to pass your preferred legislation these last 4 years than Bush Jr was. is not a fault of the system. Its the fault of the leadership of the Dem party – specifically Obama.
Islam will change
We should not necessarily look toward eliminating the United States Senate, for all of its faults. The problems which exist with the Senate are not found within the Constitution but rather in the policies which have become encrusted within the instituion over the years. They can be changed by any Senate leadership whenever such opportunity arises.
More imporatantly we need to address the question of fair representation withiin the House. Currently, we have no way of fairly assigning seats within the Congress. We have a method, but it does not represent a fair division of power within the House. Wyoming residents receive more representation than the voters in other states, because the state is guaranteed at least seat in the House under the Constitution. Given a population of 310 million and only 435 Representatives to be allocated, that means the average number of citizens represented by an average member of the House is about 713K, not the 564K of Wyoming.
The House has not seen its membership adjusted in a century, despite the earlier policies used in allocating seats in the House of Representatives during the first 130 years of the Republic. We might not want to keep adding seats the way we did during those earlier decades when the population grew tremedously proportionately and we added states willy-nilly, but we need to fix the misallocation and malrepresentation we now see in the House. At the very least the law needs to be changed to fix the base number for a single Representative in the House at whatever the population is for the least populous state in the Union. Yeah, that would mean the House would jump to something like 550 members, but it would mean that every citizen received fair representation in the process. Better yet, it doesn’t require a Constituional amendment. This can be done by the legislative process.
I don’t think “one man one vote” will necessarily lead you to the promised land. Ignorant urban voters are no better for “us” than ignorant rural voters. the rural voters represent a point of view that is worth protecting, even if so far those of us “liberal and progressive” aren’t smart enough to figure out how to get their votes.
wasn’t sure i understood the use of the term “middle class” in the post.
you and i think “liberal” is somehow “better” because we grew up in crowded, industrialized places where “liberal” is what works. live in a rural place and you will be surprised by how much more sense “conservative” makes.
this is not to endorse the insane conservative “right” who have used techniques of mass persuasion to control the low population states (cheaper there) in order to advance their agenda. but from a different historical beginning they could just as easily used techniques of mass persuasion to control the high population states… toward the same end.
And yet, it is the Senate that is Democratic and the House that is Republican, so just how unrepresentative can the House be?
This is not the United People of America.
This is the United States of America.
Big difference, and it works for me.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), ensures that the candidates, after the primaries, will not reach out to about 76% of the states and their voters. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
Presidential candidates concentrate their attention on only a handful of closely divided “battleground” states and their voters. There is no incentive for them to bother to care about the majority of states where they are hopelessly behind or safely ahead to win. 9 of the original 13 states are considered “fly-over” now. In the 2012 election, pundits and campaign operatives agree, that, at most, only 12 states and their voters will matter. They will decide the election. None of the 10 most rural states will matter, as usual. About 76% of the country will be ignored –including 19 of the 22 lowest population and medium-small states, and 17 medium and big states like CA, GA, NY, and TX. This will be more obscene than the 2008 campaign, when candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their campaign events and ad money in just 6 states, and 98% in just 15 states (CO, FL, IN, IA, MI, MN, MO, NV, NH, NM, NC, OH, PA, VA, and WI). Over half (57%) of the events were in just 4 states (OH, FL, PA, and VA). In 2004, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their money and campaign visits in 5 states; over 80% in 9 states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states.
More than 2/3rds of the states and people have been merely spectators to presidential elections. They have no influence. That’s more than 85 million voters, 200 million Americans, ignored. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
The number and population of battleground states is shrinking as the U.S. population grows.
As of March 10th, some pundits think there will be only Six States That Will Likely Decide The 2012 Election
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-six-states-that-will-likely-decide-the-2012-election/
With the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes, it could only take winning a bare plurality of popular votes in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency — that is, a mere 26% of the nation’s votes!
The National Popular Vote bill would change existing state winner-take-all laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who get the most popular votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), to a system guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes for, and the Presidency to, the candidate getting the most popular votes in the entire United States.
The National Popular Vote bill preserves the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and state control of elections. It ensures that every vote is equal, every voter will matter, in every state, in every presidential election, and the candidate with the most votes wins, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
With National Popular Vote, the United States would still be a representative republic, in which citizens continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes by states, to represent us and conduct the business of government in the periods between elections.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state are wasted and don’t matter to candidates. Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry […]
The National Popular Vote bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 small, medium, and large states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes – 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
NationalPopularVote
Follow National Popular Vote on Facebook via NationalPopularVoteInc
testing openid
I still don’t understand how openid works. I think my computer is shortcircuiting the function somehow. I’m posting on a library computer this time.
Anyway, please keep in mind that states can split apart if they wish. Texas is allowed to do so without the permission of the Senate, and there is a precedent for refusing to seat Senators from state that formed on their own, such as the case of California prior to the civil war, West Virginia during the civil war, and Vermont during and after the revolutionary war.
I see no reason why Staten Island should not be a state. It’s got more people than Alaska did when it became a state. It does have a problem in that it depends on subsidies from Manhattan, but then so does the rest of New York City, not to mention the rest of New York State.
Manhattan will never be a state. Short term it’s too important to be allowed to leave the city or the state, and after the hurricane floods the infrastructure ti will be too poor to succeed on it’s own.
As I stated in the post, you could win the presidency with a plurality in states with just 45% of the country’s population, obtaining 270 electoral votes with about 22.5% of the votes.
I don’t follow your logic. The ratio of least populated to most populated House district is less than 2:1, whereas the ratio for the Senate is about 66:1. That disparity would still exist if the filibuster were abolished tomorrow.
I don’t think it is correct that states can split if they wish. Everything I have read says they would need permission from the other states, and it is hard to imagine small states agreeing to this.
Texas can split if it desires. Other states would need permission–essentially the “new” states would have to apply for statehood.
Unless you’re gay or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, of course. Or a minority in a mostly white town. Then it won’t make as much sense. But otherwise, yeah, totally.
ian
i am sorry that you have had to face the ugly side of humanity. but trust me, it’s just as ugly in the big city, only different.
ian
i tried to say upthread that the evil right had taken over the small states because it was cheaper and gave good leverage. they rely on some ugly facts about human nature, and endorse the ugliness rather than preach the overcoming of one’s own evil impulses.
but, you, apparently, like most of the rest of us, are not willing or able to take up the challenge of winning the hearts and minds of the small staters. instead you would take away their vote (relatively speaking). this is short sighted, if for no other reason, when you find yourself in the majority and ignore the rights of the minority, what do you think will happen when that minority becomes the majority?
as far as i have been able to tell, gay rights and abortion rights, have been doing just fine in a country that grants a small electoral advantage to small states. if that changes, we may have only ourselves to blame.