The following is from a fascinating twitter thread that shows just how screwed the majority is in this country. It’s lucky to hold power even half the time. And you can believe if the shoe were on the other foot conservatives would do everything in their power the change this. Look what they’re doing now.
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate “popular vote” & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn’t won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since
GOP minority rule is a defining feature of what’s wrong with American politics, & no institution has it worse than the Senate. Dems represent tens of millions more people & won millions more votes but won the same number of seats as GOP in 2020. Minority rule could return in 2022
From 2000-2006 & 2014-2020, Senate GOP owed its majorities to minority rule. The results are far-reaching: A majority of 5 SCOTUS justices were confirmed by GOP senates elected with less support than Dems. Those justices have since undermined voting rights & upheld gerrymandering
Given the tendency of the president’s party to lose seats in midterms, there’s a strong risk that Dems will lose the Senate in 2022. The GOP could once again regain control of the Senate despite winning fewer votes & representing fewer people than Dems
GOP minority rule in the Senate is in large part a result of how the GOP gerrymandered the upper chamber in the 19th Century by admitting several lightly populated, heavily white rural states in the northwest, including splitting the Dakota territory in two for more senators
When the Senate was originally created, the largest state had 13 times as many people as the smallest state, but the gap is now 68 times today. Malapportionment may only grow worse in coming decades as the U.S. population becomes increasingly concentrated in several big states
Fortunately, there’s a solution at hand that would modestly reduce the Senate’s huge bias toward rural white Republicans: Ending the disenfranchisement of 4 million U.S. citizens by granting statehood to D.C. & Puerto Rico. Dems could pass it if they curtail the Senate filibuster
However, even adding D.C. & Puerto Rico as new states would still leave the Senate with a major overrepresentation of rural white Republicans. In the long-term, more transformative solutions will be needed to prevent a return of frequent GOP minority rule
You can find all of our data calculations & a methodology statement explaining how we arrived at these conclusions in this spreadsheet. Senate vote totals from 1990-2021 are from the invaluable @uselectionatlas:
GOP minority rule is only growing worse. If the GOP had won just ~40,000 more votes for president, 1,000 more votes for Senate (NH 2016), & hadn’t lost key redistricting lawsuits last decade, they’d have won the presidency, Senate, & House in 2020 despite millions more Dem votes
Last tweet in this thread: Via @leedrutman, the Senate for many decades has overrepresented Republicans (& conservative Southern Dems before that). Senate GOP has rarely ever represented more people than Dems since 1980 but has won power many times since
The Washington Post’s @pbump did an additional analysis of our new data on the Senate “popular vote,” including new graphs showing how frequently the GOP has won control of the Senate since the 1990s despite Dems winning more votes overall
Relevant to this thread on how the Senate massively over-represents Republicans. Curtailing the filibuster to admit new states such as D.C. is critical to rebalancing the Senate & restoring democratic majority rule (along with passing new voting reforms)
Originally tweeted by Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) on February 23, 2021.