Regarding this fall’s Senate elections, it’s often said that “the calendar” favors Republicans since “by chance” the Dems this year are defending seats in West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and maybe one or two other red to purplish states I’ve repressed for the sake of my cheerfulness. Meanwhile, there are really no prospects for Democratic pickups. Texas (Ted Cruz)? That would be delicious, but as a Minnesota Viking once said, there ain’t no Santa Claus and there ain’t no red nosed reindeer either.
Democrats currently have a 51-49 Senate majority. West Virginia is gone for sure, which means that Dems, to hold the majority, probably need to win the White House again AND run the table in Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and (I now remember) Arizona and Nevada. A tall order, even allowing for the normal allotment of crazed Republican candidates.
But it’s misleading to attribute such a state of affairs to “this year’s tough calendar.” For the Dems, it’s always a tough calendar, because the Senate for some time now has naturally favored Republicans. Here’s a rough-and-ready gauge of how hard it is for Democrats to win a Senate majority:
In two presidential races to date, Trump has never won the popular vote. Yet there are 25 states that he’s carried both times (compared to just 20 that he’s lost both times). Multiplying by two senators for each state yields a 50-40 Republican advantage as a rough base line. The Rs need only one of the other ten seats, or the presidency, to be the majority party in the Senate—when the country as a whole modestly favors the other side.
To have fewer than 50 seats, Republicans have to be under performing badly, and right now they have 49. Of course “the calendar looks tough for Democrats”!
That’s the view from 30,000 feet. Descending to Earth, the situation appears to me positively outlandish. Using these state population figures and the current partisan state-by-state lineup in the Senate, I worked out yesterday afternoon, with one eye on the disappointing Twins game, that the 51 Senate Democrats represent just over 58 percent of Americans. In other words, if representation was in line with population, there would be 58 Democratic senators, not 51.
According to polling data compiled at RealClearPolitics.com, Democrats are somewhat improbably leading in all the races for Senate seats in the above named states except for West Virginia and Montana. If that turns out to be the result on Election Day, control of the Senate will flip to Republicans, 51-49, but the 49 Senate Democrats will represent about 57.6 percent of the country’s population (and the 51 Republicans will represent the remaining 42.4 percent). The majority (of Republican senators) will be representing a minority (of all the American people). It’s no great mystery how this can be. The population of, for example, Los Angeles County is somewhat more than twice that of the combined populations of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Yet the people of these four states are represented by eight senators while the people of Los Angeles County share two senators with 30 million other Californians. The imbalance is grotesque. Once again, the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22:
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.
One “theoretical” result of an arrangement such as was decried by Hamilton might be: a president, having won in the electoral college despite receiving fewer votes than his main rival, serves a term during which there are several vacancies on the Supreme Court; he is able to appoint to the Court a slate of ideologues sympathetic to his goals because in the Senate, which is the theoretical check on his power, there is a majority of his own party, even though this majority also owes its status to a minority of the people in the country; the Senate confirms the president’s nominees, and the Court then delivers for the president and his party decisions and judgments that could never be attained in a popularly elected legislature.
If anyone dare raise a voice in complaint, their reward is likely a lecture on our majestic constitutional system.
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