I recently heard on the radio that it is projected that by 2040, something like 2/3 of the US population will be represented by 30 senators, as 34 states will cumulatively be home to 30% of the population. (The clearest sites I found were WP - paywalled,)
Such inequity strikes me as most definitely not a good thing, but I can’t imagine what could be done to address it. Can’t see the smaller population states willingly giving up their advantage.
This problem was understood at the beginning. The solution was supposed to be the House of Representatives, but freezing the number of Representatives created the same problem. Since any fix would benefit liberals at the expense of conservatives, there is no political will to make it happen.
Saw this. Response sounds complicated - and unlikely.
As originally designed, the Senate was never intended to represent the population: it was intended to represent the states.
Have 10 million Democrats move from New York and California into Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska.
FEMA camps.
Well, if you want the states to be roughly the same size then you either need migration from high-population states to low ones (like @Velocity said) or you need to break large states into smaller ones (like Northern and Southern California).
One possibly relevant data point is that in 1790 2/3 of the population was in 6 states (out of 16). So this isn’t exactly a new problem. So that 2/3 had 37.5% of the Senate. Cite: 1790 United States census - Wikipedia
The numbers aren’t apples-to-apples since a good portion of that 2/3 were enslaved.
I think that’s, in large part, because we assume that any fix would maintain the “at-large” district, “winner-takes-all” model. So we assume that blue California gets more Senators to be elected by California’s blue majority. But something like 6 million Californians voted for Trump in 2020 – more than New Yorkers who voted for Biden; more than live in the smallest 7 or 8 states combined – they “have” no senators and no electoral votes.
I’ve long been a proponent of the Nebraska/Maine model for presidential elections (with no real idea of whether I would prefer the outcome that would result). I would think any change to the Senate could (and perhaps should) include some similar apportionment – whether by a proportional vote, or districting, or something. It may still favor “liberals” and disfavor “conservatives,” but I would how dramatically.
I thought about this, but it’s really hard with the 6-year-term thing. With only one Senator up for election in any given state at a time (barring retirements, etc) you can’t really apportion them.
You would have to completely rethink the entire body.
In general, the Senate is a “small-C conservative” body. By design it was meant to be slow-moving and slow-changing. The House may get all hot and bothered about some issue, but the Senate is supposed to let things cool down before making dramatic changes.
I’m rather supportive of that idea in general - history has shown that unicameral legislatures with unchecked powers can do some pretty crazy and stupid things.
You can’t really do proportional representation with only two senators per state: You’d end up with almost every state (possibly every state, depending on the algorithm) with exactly one Democratic and one Republican senator, because they’re all closer to 50-50 than to 100-0.
Sure. But I think that any solution requires more senators – how could you possibly “equalize” the senatorial power between Wyoming (580,000) and California (40 million) otherwise? Of course, this is the problem the House was supposed to have and found too unwieldy (which is why there is a cap on the total number of congresspeople).
Edit: Put differently, I think that (assuming about 330 million people in the 50 states and a population of 600,000 in the smallest state) you need at least 550 senators total to ensure each state gets one.
As a Nebraskan, I say “Welcome, Friends!” We’ve got the room to spare.
Yeah - I remember thinking that was a great idea. Maybe some liberal industrialists can pay their workers a premium to locate to such states!
Yeah, that part of the “problem of the Senate” is baked in with its very existence. That was what was wanted – a represenation NOT proportional to population, feature not bug. Sure, the founders may have never contemplated that the biggest state would be 67 times the smallest one, but they would have said, well, that’s what the House is for.
That at some point a large segment of the population thus represented may be filled with nothing but spite and scorn for the other to the point of preferring everyone to suffer rather than “them” to benefit, well, I have to believe they probably could imagine that quite well.
With the House, the freezing of the number creates a phenomenon where the differential weight of some voters will be greater than that of others, since there’s really only 385 out of the 435 seats to play with. Which when you add in the case of the larger states the fact that you may then gerrymander, and you leave it up to partisan bodies to decide how, that helps lock in unrepresentative proportions.
Heck, in the original Congress an amendment was put forth to make a Congressional district represent between 30 and 50 thousand people, which would have given us a 6,000-strong Congress by now (or, rather, would have become the first undone amendment within a couple of decades). A “Wyoming plan” of making each seat be equal to the polulation of the smallest state would probably have to still be tied to a “hard ceiling” just in case some smaller state suffers a mass demographic collapse.
May I remind, though: Today, the Senate is almost 50/50 in partisan representation. There’s nothing about it eventually having 70 senators for 2/3 of the population that is intrinsecally nefarious other than to a certain instinctive sense of “fairness”.
We all are aware that the USA almost universally works on direct-to-person vote for a single official per post in first-past-the-post plurality election, with only a very small handful of places that do runoffs or preferential ballot. Like the WTA system for assigning Electoral Votes that all but two relatively small states use, that is itself perpetuated because it strengthen the political weight of the jurisdiction and makes it easier to get straight majorities without need for coalitions.
There were only 13 states as of May 29, 1790. Number 14 was VT, then came Kentucky, June 1, 1792, and #16 was TN June 1, 1796.
I don’t know how constitutional scholars would view this, but it seems to me that it would take two constitutional amendments to make the senate more representative. One to amend the amending clause itself to delete the clause that says that no amendment shall deprive any state of its equal representation in the senate and then a second to actual do it.
A much better solution, which would require only one amendment would be to remove the power of the senate to overrule the house. In Canada, the senate can delay, amend, whatever, legislation, but then it goes back to parliament for final disposal. But I cannot see any such amendments clear 3/4 of the states (let alone 2/3 of the senate).
It reminds me of when I was growing up in Philadelphia and the PA state legislature had not redistricted since, IIRC, 1900. Philly and Pittsburgh had grown enormously in that time (Philly hit 2 million in 1950, although they have lost 1/4 of that to the suburbs). Although failure to redistrict violated the state constitution, there was no remedy until the mid 60s one man/one vote decision. Until that time, it was considered a “political decision”, not subject to court action. They said that if the voters didn’t like, they should elect a new legislature. But the rural legislators were dominant and were certainly not going to give up power to the cities that they loathed just because the state constitution demanded it.
The rot goes back a long way; it was not invented by Trump.
I mean - it was the decision of liberals/Democrats themselves to cluster themselves into just a few highly-populated states. Republicans didn’t make them do that, nor did Republicans make the rules.
The problem was a self-created one.
What are they supposed to do there? How will they make a living?
The same living as other people there.
But the solution is right there - emigrate from big blue states to small red states, and Democrats would flip ten or more seats in the Senate.
Republicans didn’t make the rules. They just benefit from them. This is like a blue basketball team that has only short players, complaining that a red opponent with tall players is better able to grab rebounds. The solution isn’t to change the rules, but to get tall players.
Erm… what? People don’t make decisions about where to live based on how much voting power they have.
Not as their primary reason, for sure. But by and large urban Democrats live in San Francisco, New York, Boston, etc. because they like the urban life, like the urban amenities, like being surrounded by urban liberals, want the urban jobs, transportation, etc.
Rural conservatives, meanwhile, put up with the disadvantages of rural life but also like the peace, quiet and being surrounded by conservatives.
If Democrats were willing to sacrifice the urban perks and move rural, they could negate the Senate disadvantage. But they typically refuse because the change in lifestyle would be too great - but then complain that a big majority is represented by only 30% of Senators.