Bad, and getting worse

The Great Compromise wildly favors white Evangelical Christian Republicans.

Small states are getting a much bigger say in who gets on Supreme Court

Kavanaugh could be confirmed by a narrow Senate Republican majority rooted in the nation's smaller states over the virtually unified objections of a Democratic Senate minority strongest in the largest states. 

And he probably will.

The Democratic minority of the senate represent 40 million more Americans than the Republican majority, and a much bigger piece of America's nonwhites and non-Christians.

The Senate's bias toward small states isn't new: An extended standoff over the issue nearly derailed the convention that wrote the Constitution. 

Yet the small-state bias may now be more relevant than ever, because it aligns more precisely than at earlier points in American history with the tectonic forces separating the two parties, including urbanization, racial and religious diversity, and the transition to an information-based economy. 

As small and large states separate even further along those dimensions in the years ahead, the constitutional compromise that provided each state two senators -- in a narrow vote held 231 years ago next week -- could provoke growing tension.

. . . .

The contrast between the two Senate coalitions emerges even more clearly when looking at the total population of the states each side represents. 

One way of measuring the difference is to assign half of each state's population to each senator. 

Measured that way, the 51 Republican senators now represent about 143 million people, according to the latest Census Bureau state population estimates. 

The 49 Democratic senators represent about 182 million people, nearly 40 million more. 

That's about 2.8 million people per Republican senator and 3.7 million people per Democratic senator.

. . . .

If every Republican votes for Kavanaugh, every Democrat votes no and Arizona's ailing GOP Sen. John McCain doesn't vote, as is likely, the senators opposing the choice would represent over 42 million more people than those supporting it.

The sheer disparity in size between the largest and smallest states is the most visible source of questions about the Senate's democratic legitimacy. 

That divergence is sometimes summarized as the ratio between California and Wyoming, the largest and smallest states: Each California senator represents nearly 19.8 million people, over 68 times as many as the 290,000 each Wyoming senator represents.

. . . .

David Shor, a senior analyst at Civis Analytics, a Democratic-oriented data consulting firm, has quantified how the Senate has increasingly diluted the electoral impact of minority voters over time. 

Using a statistical technique that compares the minority share of the population in each state to the minority share of the nation's overall population, he found that minority voters are more underrepresented in the Senate today than at any point since 1870. 

Projections by Robert Griffin of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute show that minority underrepresentation is on track to widen further for at least the next 40 years as the nation grows more diverse.

The reason for this growing gap, Shor explains, is that the minority population, particularly immigrants and their children, are concentrating in the largest states already disadvantaged by the Senate's structure, while the predominantly white and smaller states that gain under the rules are diversifying much more slowly. 

"The issue at a high level is that most growth in the nonwhite population has been concentrated in large states like California, New York and Florida," Shor says.

That means the racial implications of the Senate's small state bias will only grow as the US continues its transition into a majority nonwhite nation through the next quarter century or so. 

Because that growing nonwhite population is concentrated in relatively fewer states, their influence in the Senate will be enduringly constrained. 

"The Senate is the last redoubt of white voting power," Shor says. 

"You have a small group of white rural states ... that are going to have an enormous amount of power, not just over judges, but over vetoing legislation."

. . . .

James Madison, the Constitution's principal architect, bitterly opposed equal representation for every state in the Senate; the dispute over population-based versus equal Senate representation proved the most difficult for the framers to resolve. 

(As Lee notes, equal representation in the Senate was decided only on a 5-4 vote of the states, with Massachusetts' delegation divided, on July 16, 1787.) 

Madison viewed equal Senate representation as unfair to voters in the largest states, but even he did not imagine that small and large states would consistently diverge in so many ways -- not only in their political preference but also in their social and economic structure.