How to win when you lose: unbalanced representation in the U.S. government

I haven’t talked politics here much lately. Frankly it’s all been too demoralizing. I mean, how do you talk about someone who is so patently unqualified, not to mention arguably legally disqualified, not only “winning” an election (courtesy of archaic undemocratic rules), but receiving nearly full-throated support from the cynical opportunists of a political party who only a few months ago were decrying his very presence on the scene?

Well, enough on that. Others are fighting that fight better than I ever could, so I’m going to move into the realm where I flourish: geeky data analysis.

Specifically, I want to look at three ways in which the U.S. government — Congress and the presidency — are inherently imbalanced, plus one additional way that they’re being made more so through the shameful tactics of one party whose power depends on exploiting those imbalances to their fullest extent. (Take a guess which one I’m talking about.)

The three ways are: 1) House district apportionment (specifically, “Gerrymandering”), 2) the two-per-state structure of the U.S. Senate, and 3) the Electoral College. Full disclosure: I am not a history scholar. I’m relying mostly on things I actually — gasp — remember learning in public schools in the 1980s.

I’m going to just jump to my thesis here, since the perspective it provides is going to come up in a few places in the rest of the post: In the present day, the values of most Democratic voters favor living in more densely populated areas, whereas the values of most Republican voters favor living in more sparsely populated areas. And since these three aspects of the American electoral process were specifically designed to benefit less-populous states (to get them to go along with the Revolution in the first place), the Republicans today are in a position of power far beyond their actual support amongst the electorate as a whole.

Whew. OK, let’s begin.

Gerrymandering in House seat apportionment

Ah, Elbridge Gerry. Over 200 years later, his name is still applied to the sadly still too common practice of redrawing congressional districts in absurd shapes to deliver the maximum number of House seats to a favored political party. Both parties have been guilty of doing this, but as the Republicans have been in a position of outsized influence at the state level (see my main thesis), the majority of questionable district apportionments in modern times have been to the benefit of the Republican Party.

Beyond the unscrupulous tactics of Gerrymandering, there is still an inherent imbalance in the House, which becomes even greater when we talk about the Senate: because the total number of seats in the House is fixed at 435 (due to the Reapportionment Act of 1929), and because each state has to have at least one representative, low-population states have much higher per-resident representation than larger ones.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the numbers. Here’s a table (source: Wikipedia) that breaks down state populations and representation both in the House and Electoral College.

If you study the numbers carefully, you see it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the House level. Wyoming, the least populous state, carries more weight per seat than California, the most populous, but in between there are variations. Conservative Montana, the most populous state with only one seat, is under-represented compared to liberal Rhode Island, the least populous state with two seats. But one thing that this table doesn’t show is the representation by party for each of those 435 house seats. If we factor that in, and look at the aggregate, we see that the Republican majority in the House doesn’t come close to representing a majority of the American public at large: