Looking at the map in the bottom right, literally ~5 states have the same population as NYC alone, and those five states get ten senators while NYC is just one city in the state of New York, which only gets 2 senators. Because each state, regardless of population, gets two senators, Wyoming with 579,315 people gets the same number of senators (1 senator / 289,657.5 people) as California does with 39,536,653 people (1 senator / 19,768,326.5 people). Essentially, one Wyomingite is worth 68.25 Californians.
Because the Republicans have the majority of low-population states, this is exaggerated even more when you look the entire senate. If you add up the population of states with both senators of the same party, and take half the population of states with one of each, you get one Democratic senator per 3,689,314 people, and one Republican senator per 2,779,541 people, because of how the senate is structured. In other words, 49 Democratic senators represent 180,776,374 people, and 51 Republican senators represent 141,756,607 people.
For the House, everyone knows it’s gerrymandered, and looking at the Vote % vs. Seat % makes it obvious. Republicans got 49.1% of the vote in the 2016 House elections but 55.4% of the seats, and Democrats got 48.0% of the vote but only 44.6% of the seats. A difference of 1.1% in the vote does not equal a difference of 10.8% seats. Similar to Virginia’s State Assembly election last year. The House elections are more exaggerated if you look at 2012′s election, where Democrats got 48.8% and Republicans got 47.6%; Democrats got 1.2% MORE of the vote, but 46.2% of the seats versus the Republicans’ 53.8% of the seats. Win 1.2% more of the vote but get 7.6% fewer seats?
The gerrymandering in the House is an easy fix if Democrats can just take over State legislatures and stop it, or if you’re worried about Democrats then gerrymandering, get a referendum/ballot measure to switch redistricting from state legislature to independent commission. Fixing the Senate’s structural bias, on the other hand, is much more difficult, because Clause 1 of Article 1, §3 of the Constitution states that each state has two senators, and the Seventeenth Amendment that changes the election procedures to popular vote rather than by state legislature keeps that “two senators per state,” meaning that a constitutional amendment would be required to change the number of senators, and why would any state want to reduce the percentage of senators it has and therefore its power in the Senate?
Speaking of which, constitutional amendments themselves are biased towards small states, because it states that ¾ of the states (38) have to ratify an amendment, meaning that 13 states can kill it. The smallest 13 states have 14,278,937 people, meaning the smallest 25% of states have just 4.39% of the population. Think about that; 4.39% of the population can override what the other 95.61% want, just because of the “3/4 of the states must ratify” component. On the other hand, the largest 12 states have 194,081,990 people, or 59.71%.
If you say “If it wasn’t like that then the small states wouldn’t have a say in government!” Well, how is that unfair? Government is supposed to represent the people, and it isn’t representing everyone if a small number of people have more power/say than a large number of people. That’s the entire problem of the “The top one percent of one percent holding XX% of all the wealth” thing.
2087
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