The Senate Has Always Been Wildly Unrepresentative
It’s not at all clear whether that will work to the advantage of Democrats or Republicans in the future.
The constituents of Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, are getting more Senate representation with each passing year.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
We live an era when many time-honored American political traditions — some admittedly strange or even sinister, some not — are being identified as Threats to Our Democracy. A partial list of the threats that have been identified would I think have to include gerrymandering, the Electoral College, partisanship, barriers to voting, hesitancy to require people to carry government-issued identification, the naturalizing of immigrants and the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court justices.
Then there’s the U.S. Senate. After David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report pointed out in a New York Times op-ed Monday that “a majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population,” my fellow Bloomberg View columnist Conor Sen predicted: