A very useful chart done by Ezra Klein shows that there’s no clear partisan valence to the Senate over-representation of low-population states:
You see the Republican senators colored in red, the Democratic ones in blue. The chart plots DW-NOMINATE ideological ranks versus state population size ranks. If you do it by population rather than than by population rank it looks a little different, since California is substantially larger than Texas, but it’s a small difference and that’s probably not the right way to look at it.
What you get out of senate malaportionment is not so much a partisan imbalance as simply an imbalance of interests. The idiosyncratic needs of residents of large, empty squares in the interior west are catered to by the federal government. The idiosyncratic needs of residents of urban cores are not. Or to take an even clearer example, look at in how California’s farmers are treated relative to the farmers of the plains.
Previous in TP Yglesias
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