Tyranny of the minority

In March of last year I wrote a post that discussed the problems with the Electoral College and how the rural states had more influence on the outcome than highly urban states. Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes and California gets 55. But that gives a Wyoming voter more influence over the outcome than a California voter.

Along with that post I linked to a map (with explanation) created by Neil Freeman at Mental Floss. This map redrew state boundaries so that each state has 6.1 million voters rather than the current state boundaries where Wyoming has a half-million and California has 40 million.

My friend and debate partner responded to that earlier post quite simply: “Gerrymandered!”

After doing presentations on gerrymandering I disagree with my friend. Even highly gerrymandered states follow the national law about districts having equal population.

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress says the same imbalance that affects the Electoral College also affects the Senate. And this imbalance is likely to create a legitimacy crisis for our upper chamber. Millhiser pulls out some statistics to make his point.

Because two-thirds of Latinos live in the five largest states, one white voter is equal to 1.7 Latinos. David Birdsell of Baruch College says by 2040 “About 70% of American are expected to live in 15 states.” Flip it around and 30% of the population lives in 35 states or, as Millhiser puts it, “That means that 30 percent of the population will elect 70 percent of the senators.” But we don’t have to wait until 2040 for the problem to appear.

The Senate imbalance will affect the approval of Brett Kavanaugh, the next Supreme Court nominee.

Currently, Republicans hold 51 votes in the Senate, while the Democratic caucus is only 49 senators. Yet the Democratic “minority” represents nearly 40 million more people than the Republican “majority.”

Indeed, this Republican advantage may already be a permanent feature of the Senate. In 2016, when Senate Republicans blocked Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the 46 Senate Democrats represented 20 million more people than the 54 Republicans. In 2017, when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to occupy the same Supreme Court seat, the 45 senators who opposed Gorsuch represented more than 25 million more people than the senators who supported him.
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A president who [didn't get a majority of votes] is poised to fill a second seat on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that his party represents only a minority of the country in the Senate. One of those seats, moreover, was only available for him to fill because the party that represents only a minority of the nation stole it from a president who was elected twice.

And if Kavanaugh gets to the Supreme Court, he is likely to put an even bigger thumb on America’s electoral scales, making it even harder for a majority of voters to remove the GOP from power.