After Arlen Specter joined us [?!?], it occurred to me that, hey, there goes another big state represented by 2 Democrats (kind of). Then I thought about the pissant states that have Repub Senators (e.g. Idaho).
So I decided to channel Nate Silver for a moment, and I did some arithmetic.
It turns out that the states with 2 Repub Senators have ~75.4 million citizens. States with 2 Democratic Senators have ~159.8 million. For the numerically challenged that is more than 2.11X (68 percent, ignoring the divided states). This means the 'pure' blue states have > twice the population that the 'pure' red states do...
Oh BTW, the states with 1 Republican & 1 Non-Republican, have 66.4 million citizens.
Dividing those people equally (between the parties), we total 193 million people represented by Dems, 108.6 million represented by Republicans. Dems control 64% of the population, Senatorially speaking.
Note that I assumed Franken wins in Minnesota, and that Bernie Sanders & Joe Lieberman are Dems (kind of)...
So we see again how badly the founding fathers failed to anticipate the future. Here are the 14 2 Republican Senator states (in no particular order):
Alabama: 4.6 M (Sessions & Shelby)
Tennessee: 6.2 M (Alexander & Corker)
Mississippi: 2.9 M (Wicker & Cochran)
Maine: 1.3 M (Collins & Snowe)
Idaho: 1.5 M (Risch & Crapo)
Arizona: 6.5 M (Kyl & McCain)
Georgia: 9.7M (Chambliss & Isakson)
Kentucky: 4.3M (Bunning & McConnell)
Oklahoma: 3.6M (Inhofe & Coburn)
Utah: 2.7M (Hatch & Bennett)
Kansas: 2.8M (Roberts & Brownback)
Texas: 24.3 M (Hutchison & Cornyn)
South Carolina: 4.5 M (Graham & Demint)
Wyoming: .5 M (Barrasso & Enzi)
Only Texas is really a large state...
California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania are all states with more than 10 M population represented by 2 Dems...
Oh the split states are:
Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Indiana,
Florida, Alaska, South Dakota, Louisiana, & Ohio....
If we had proportional representation, we wouldn't be worrying about 60 seats in the Senate; we'd be trying to get to 2/3rds...Someone once did an analysis that showed how few people (the smallest 20 states) could gum up the Senate...Here is my calculation:
- Mississippi 2,938,618
- Arkansas 2,855,390
- Kansas 2,802,134
- Utah 2,736,424
- Nevada 2,600,167
- New Mexico 1,984,356
- West Virginia 1,814,468
- Nebraska 1,783,432
- Idaho 1,523,816
- Maine 1,316,456
- New Hampshire 1,315,809
- Hawaii 1,288,198
- Rhode Island 1,050,788
- Montana 967,440
- Delaware 873,092
- South Dakota 804,194
- Alaska 686,293
- North Dakota 641,481
- Vermont 621,270
[N.B. District of Columbia 591,833]
- Wyoming 532,668
Total 30.5 million people. 10% of the population...
Hey founding fathers: What were you thinking?