The makeup of the United States Senate is inherently unfair and gives both a distorted and unequal representation to millions of Americans.
Originally the rules for representation of the Senate were born out of a compromise reached between small states and big states in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention. But that compromise was made by the same people who argued over whether "other people" (Black people) should receive any representation at all.
Today, it's a hopelessly outdated compromise that gives an unfair advantage to Republicans.
The idea of having 2 Senators per state was agreed upon in conjunction with other contentious decisions:
By the end of June, debate between the large and small states over the issue of representation in the first chamber of the legislature was becoming increasingly acrimonious.
...the delegates from the small states lost the first battle. The convention approved a resolution establishing population as the basis for representation in the House of Representatives, thus favoring the larger states. On a subsequent small-state proposal that the states have equal representation in the Senate, the vote resulted in a tie.
...
Also crowding into this complicated and divisive discussion over representation was the North-South division over the method by which slaves were to be counted for purposes of taxation and representation. On July 12 Oliver Ellsworth proposed that representation for the lower house be based on the number of free persons and three-fifths of "all other persons," a euphemism for slaves.
With this compromise and with the growing realization that such compromise was necessary to avoid a complete breakdown of the convention, the members then approved Senate equality.
Current Composition
The above compromise has endured pretty much intact for all these years. Today we have a Senate with a 51-49 breakdown between the Democratic and Republican caucuses.
(Two independents caucus with Dems and one Republican seat is currently vacant making it temporarily 51-48)
A traditional map of our current Senate looks like this:
In the above map, blue represents states with two Democrats, red represents states with two Republican Senators and purple is for states with one of each.
But this geographic representation does not give a good picture of the population or the distribution of voters in the country. For that we need a cartogram, a re-rendering of a map so that it shows a true representation of population while maintaining a recognizable sense of geography. Here's the cartogram for the Senate:
Notice that even though there are roughly the same number of Senators in each caucus, there is noticeably much more blue on this map than red.
In fact there are over 40 million more people in the Blue States than there are in the Red States. Mark Newman, from the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and the creator of this cartogram puts it this way:
This map appears to have more blue than red, which is not an illusion: it reflects the fact that although there are only slightly more senators in the Democratic caucus than the Republican one (51 versus 49), the number of people in blue states significantly outnumbers the number of people in red ones, because the blue ones have higher populations on average. Using the latest figures from the US Census, for instance, we find that the total population of blue states is 167.9 million people, while the total population of red states is 125.2 million. (In this calculation, I split the populations of the purple states 50:50.)
Okay, so what started out as a small state/large state compromise has now degraded into something untenable: a much greater representation for one party than the other. If the Senate were proportional, we could calculate the breakdown like so:
(167m*100)/292m = x = 57.19 Dem Senators.
Rounding off, the current split would be 57 Democrats and 43 Republicans.
So what can we do about all this? Well it would prove very challenging to try to change this, but not so impossible as you might think. After all:
Senators were selected by the state legislatures, not by the voters, until 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
This effectively ended "state representation" in congress by allowing the people to elect their own Senators democratically.
Now all we need to do is take the final step in that process and make the election of our Senators truly democratic by tying the number of Senators to population and not to an outdated compromise that's long since outgrown its relevance.
But even if we can't change this - it would be tough - we should take heart that these facts demonstrate that there are alot more Democrats and liberals in the country than the representation and conventional wisdom would tell you.
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(Maps courtesy of Mark Newman, Univeristy of Michigan.)