I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
Counting the two Independents as Democrats, who they caucus with:
Top 25 states: 2 Democrats - 52% 2 Republicans - 40% Split - 8%
Bottom 25 states: 2 Democrats - 36% 2 Republicans - 60% Split - 4%
Top quintile: 2 Democrats - 50% 2 Republicans - 40% Split - 10%
2nd quintile: 2 Democrats - 60% 2 Republicans - 30% Split - 10%
Middle quintile: 2 Democrats - 40% 2 Republicans - 60%
4th quintile: 2 Democrats - 30% 2 Republicans - 70%
Bottom quintile: 2 Democrats - 40% 2 Republicans - 50% Split - 10%
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
I definitely appreciate your measurements, but I think your analysis is off.
The top & bottom quintiles don't cancel out, but rather support the same trend, which is that Republicans have more voting power per capita.
That said, I am surprised that the top & bottom quintiles are nearly balanced. I'll have to look up which bottom quintile states have Democratic senators.
Thank you for that.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
The existence of the Virginia Plan (the Large State Plan) and the New Jersey Plan (the Small State Plan) indicates that balancing the differing interests of high- and low- population states was a prominent concern of the founders. I think they would expect states to often align by population size since that very thing occurring at the convention led to the compromise written into the Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Plan
I have a hard time conceiving of matters that states would separate themselves on by population size other then proportional representation in Congress back then.
I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
>I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
Not so much, unless you consider Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont to be "frontier" states in 1787. Actual frontier states like Georgia were in favor of the Virginia Plan as they figured their population would grow soon enough and they could take advantage of their eventual large population (with slaves being counted as 3/5 of a person) in a "Virginia Plan" world.
The Connecticut Compromise[0][3] ended up in the Constitution as a reconciliation of the Virginia Plan[1][4] and the New Jersey Plan[2][5], with the larger states supporting the Virginia Plan and smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan.
The above is incredibly abridged and ignores much context. As such, I strongly recommend you read Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the US Constitution[7] (the result of the Connecticut Compromise) as well as the original Virginia and New Jersey plans, or at least the wikipedia pages I linked for a much better discourse on the topic.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Plan
[3] The current system. Which differs from the original only in direct election of Senators, rather than them being appointed by state legislatures[6].
[4] Proposed a bicameral legislature with both houses apportioned by population.
[5] Proposed a unicameral legislature with one vote per state.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
[7] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Edit: Added the missing link.