Mark Settle

If you were shown an outline of the United States’ territory and asked to divide it into 50 distinct states, you might approach the question in any number of ways. Relative population parity might seem important. Or perhaps things like cultural heritage and contiguous metropolises and physical geography would drive your thinking.

But surely, no matter your criteria, would you draw a map that looks like this:

The accidents of history and the calculations of politicians have left us with a map that distorts everything from the election of presidents to the balance of political power in the Senate. This has been true to some degree ever since the Founding Fathers hatched the Connecticut Compromise (which was meant as just a short-term fix). Though equal representation took enormous steps forward with the passage of the 14th, 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments, the distortion caused by disproportionate state populations has only intensified.

The 1790 census reports that the biggest state in the original union, by population, was Massachusetts (with 378,787 people), while the smallest was Delaware (with 59,096). This is a 6.4 to 1 ratio.

These days, Texas’ population is 17 times as large as the combined populations of North Dakota and South Dakota (which, not incidentally, were themselves introduced as separate states specifically to give the region disproportionate political force). And California’s population is 69 times as large as Wyoming’s. (If the rest of the country had a senator for every 246,891 people, like Wyoming does, the United States would have 1,140 senators).

The Status Quo and Governability

James Fallows writes that this problem is made worse by “[t]he very recent practice of subjecting almost every Senate action to the threat of filibuster, which requires 60 votes to surmount… …means that in theory Senators representing only 12% of the U.S. population could block efforts that Senators representing the other 88% support.”

At least viewed strictly through the Democrat/Republican lens, things aren’t quite this dramatic:

“[Including new Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown]…the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US population. The 59 others (Democratic plus 2 Independent) represent just under 63.5 percent. (Taking 2009 state populations from here. If you count up the totals and split a state’s population when it has a spit delegation, you end up with about 112.3 million Republican, 194.7 million Democratic + Indep. Before Brown’s election, it was about 198 million Democratic + Ind, 109 million Republican.)

Let’s round the figures to 63/37 and apply them to the health care debate. Senators representing 63 percent of the public vote for the bill; those representing 37 percent vote against it. The bill fails.”

Unfortunately, health care is not the only important but politically toxic policy issue.

Moving Closer to “One Man, One Vote”

With this in mind, Neil Freeman has proposed a new map:

He notes that “Alaska and Hawaii are [now] part of the states of Olympia and Coronado, respectively.” Freeman continues:

“In 2000, the Census Bureau determined the United States population to be 281,421,906, distributed in 50 states and one federal district. The states ranged in population from 493,782 to 33,871,648. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size – 281,421,906 divided by 50 is 5,616,997. This map shows one possible way to redraw the fifty states.”

Given that Wyoming’s two senators carry the same power as every other senator, even though they represent a population roughly equal to that of Fresno, CA, this is a step in the right direction.

Matt Yglesias observes:

“One interesting thing about this is that it would shake up some of our existing party/region alignments. Today, for example, the Pacific coast is a solid stack of three Democratic states. But there are actually a lot of conservative voters living in Oregon, Washington, and California, and I believe the expansion of Oregon into “Willamette” would produce a red state. But it would be a different kind of red state from our existing red regional blocs. Conversely, some of these new southern states would be considerably more liberal than any existing ones, but their Senators would still band together with southern conservatives on certain topics of regional interest.”

The next step is for both chambers of congress to call for an amendment to the Constitution. Upon passage from the House, the bill would require the vote of 67 senators (representing a total of somewhere between 94 million and 285 million of the nation’s 306 million people). Of course, ratification’s even harder: the objection of just 13 states (home to somewhere between 12 million and 182 million people) would kill the bill.