My first diary entry was supposed to be an "introduction" - but I think that there are much more interesting things to write about than myself. F'rinstance, did you know that even though Democratic Senators are in the minority, they actually represent 50.59% of the people in this country? That's assuming each Senator represents all the people of his or her state, of course. (A better way to do it might be to count up how many people actually voted for each Senator in his or her most recent election, but that information is hard to come by.) So, as I read about the Republican Senators considering the
"nucular" option for stopping Democrats from filibustering Bush's reichwingnut Judicial nominees, I started wondering, how many people will they actually be telling to "go fuck themselves" if they do this?
Fired up Google, and found the 2003 state population figures (the latest I could find, nicely laid out here). So, then I fired up the old Access database, entered all the Senators, their parties, and the population of their states, totalled the numbers and discovered the awe-full truth (or, if you're a Republican, the awful truth): Democratic Senators, in toto, represent a constituency of 293,698,914 people, or 50.59% of the population. Republican Senators, in toto, represent a constituency of 286,174,765 people, or 49.30% percent of the population. Jim Jeffords, the lone Independent, represents 619,107 Americans or .11%. Since Jeffords caucuses with the Democrats, it can argued that the Republicans are telling 50.7% of the population to "go fuck themselves." Even leaving out Jeffords, Democratic Senators represent 7,534,149 more people than Republican Senators do. With Jeffords, we're talking more than eight million more people represented by non-Republicans than are represented by Republicans.
Of course, there are problems with this method - the citizens of states are counted twice, once for each senator. And the citizens of states with at least one Republican Senator can arguably be said to have at least a voice in this extension of Cheney Doctrine. So, since the Senators from those "split-personality" states (13 of them) cancel each other out, let's just look at the total population of states (counted only once) that are represented by only one party:
Twenty-one states are represented only by Republicans. Only sixteen states are represented only by Democrats. Those numbers look more... er, majoritarian - but the population figures tell a different story. The 21 Republican-represented states have a total population of 116,868,423. The 16 Democratic-represented states - the ones, remember, whose citizens are being invited to "go fuck themselves" - have a total population of 120,940,051 - that is, 4,071,628 more people than the Republican-represented states.
Huh. Seems like this information could be used productively by somebody, somewhere, ya think?
(I made a quick and dirty table with all the nasty numbers, which can be found here. For those who want to make their own database to play with, a comma-delimited text file is here)
Update: Added a table with the states broken out by representation here, and the comma-delimited text file of that information is here.