Wampum

Population And Senate Representation

At Tapped, Nick Confessore writes:

Now,via Josh Marshall, we have another dubious bit of political math courtesy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The upshot is that the Democratic Party, in addition to being dependent on the black vote, is also heavily dependent on voters who live in large cities. Why, without votes emanating from these urban citadels, George W. Bush would have won an electoral landslide!

(This is the sort of thing that makes me want to pull out my calculator and figure out what percentage of the United States the incoming Republican Senate caucus actually represents. After all, the Senate is permanently gerrymandered in favor of rural -- which is to say, Republican -- interests.)

I was having similar thoughts last weekend and did pull out the calculator. I got census projections for 2005 here.

Each person (other than residents of DC, who I ignored) has two Senators. I added up the population of each state for each Democratic Senator and for each Republican Senator (I also ignored Jeffords). A state with 2 Senators from the same party had its population counted twice. I then divided the totals by two to get the numbers back to an estimate of the population of the United States.

Democratic Senators represent 143,525,000 Americans while Republican Senators represent 141,365,000 Americans.

The GOP's 55-44 advantage in the new Senate is entirely due to the Constitutiuonal bais in favor of small states. Feel any better, Nick?

Posted by Dwight Meredith at November 15, 2004 03:32 PM | TrackBack