James Carville is freaking out. Read this for the colorful expressions and try to imagine his condition come October if, as seems likely, the polls show a tight presidential race. I'm just here to fact check his claim, twice asserted in a relatively brief rant, that "eighteen percent of the population controls 52 Senate seats." This is true. The 26 smallest states, beginning with Wyoming (population: 580,000) and ending with Carville's native Louisiana (population: 4,650,000) have two senators each, and a total population of about 57,630,000, which is 17.4% of the country's population of 330,150,000. All figures are US Census Bureau, December 2019 estimate. When I was working up the arithmetic, I rounded each state's population to the nearest 10,000, which may account for my figure coming in fractionally under Carville's 18%.
It would be possible, but difficult, to overstate the advantage the Republican party derives from the arrangement. Of the 52 senators who represent this 18%, 31 are Republicans and 21 are Democrats. (I am counting Bernie Sanders and Maine's Angus King as Democrats, since they caucus with the Dems.) The remaining 48 senators represent 82% of the country's population, and there are in this group 26 Democrats and 22 Republicans. Two-thirds of Americans live in fifteen states, and of their 30 senators, 19 are Democrats and 11 are Republicans.
Carville doesn't like, or hates, more accurately f'ing hates, the way that some of the Democrats who are running for president talk. It's not that he necessarily disagrees with them; it's that to beat Trump he thinks they should be talking about different things. Probably he's right, but some part of the mismatch, or whatever you want to call it, must arise from the fact that the exact center in American politics, calculated as an average of national public opinion, is well to the left of the exact center within the halls of power. Think, for example, of the last two Supreme Court appointments. The president, a Republican who lost the national vote by 3 million, selected a nominee. The nominee was then confirmed by a Senate in which the Republican majority represented a minority of citizens. Assuming that Americans indicate their preference for the kind of Supreme Court justices they'd prefer by whether they vote for Democrats or Republicans for president and US Senate, the inescapable conclusion is that majorities are voting for one thing and getting another crammed down their throat.
Yes, I understand, it's the Constitution that provides for two senators for each state, regardless of population. This was in part a sop to the less populated slave states, and perusing the census of 1790, it's not clear that the framers would have made the deal had they been prophets of demography: in 240 years, the population has grown considerably, and grown considerably more lopsided by state. But the prospect for amendment seems impossibly remote, since the required supermajority would have to include some beneficiaries of the current arrangement. At some point, though, the political stability we've enjoyed for so long could unravel. What if Trump is reelected with a deficit of 5 million votes, and at the end of his second term the Senate consists of a majority of 55 Republican senators representing only a third of the country's population? During the recently concluded impeachment trial, there was a lot of talk about the Federalist Papers, usually in the hushed tones reserved for sacred texts. Here is Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22:
The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after awhile revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last.
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