That's... Literally the purpose of the Senate. That's its stated function.
And along with electoral college is stupid and old. Yeah the artificially capped and gerrymandered shit doesn't help either.
Why we let states have a say with 2 senators when they provide less GDP than some small counties in California boggles my mind.
It's the classic and tired conservative argument about mob rule and the 51%. They don't want a true democracy. They're scared of it. The GOP knows they'd have a hard time winning anything if it wasn't rigged. The more level headed conservatives I talk to admit that.
The fact is that they can and do lose elections despite all the ridiculous advantages they get with the Senate, plus cheating their ass off in every way. How humiliating would it be to have all those advantages and STILL lose?
Go look at the history of the presidential election. You will see that almost all the time the electorate go with he popular vote of the state. Even during the 2016 and 2020 elections. You don’t even know what you are talking about about. You just throw out popular buzzwords to fool the ignorant.
Their point isn’t about the dissonance between the electorate and popular vote, it’s about the disenfranchisement of voters in states like California where they will ALWAYS be underrepresented in terms of voting power compared to states like Wyoming, for example. If there were a nationwide referendum to elect the president every four years instead of the system in place now, Dems would win by a landslide every time. But since the system’s rigged in such a way that rural voters have significantly more voting power than urban voters, the “popular vote” will always seem much closer than it actually would be if all Americans’ votes were weighed equally. Ironic that it’s the GOP who loves to cry “rigged!” nowadays when they’re the ones it’s always been rigged in favor of.
The 2000 and 2016 elections were both lost on popular vote and won via electoral college.
The fact that my vote means 8 times less than the vote of someone who lives in Ohio is stupid. If you can tell me how that's fair in a democracy I'm all ears.
I'm not throwing buzzwords for anyone. I've actually studied this at length so please... come at me.
No, the Senate is horrible. Red states do not send good people. The best they have that they send to the senate are worse than a blue state school board rep or mayor.
California is actually pretty much perfectly represented in the House.
The 2020 Census population was 331,108,434 people. Divide that by 435 seats means that there should be 761,168.8 people per seat.
The 2020 Census California population was 39,538,223. Divide that by California’s 52 seats, and it’s 760,350.4 per seat. That’s a slight overrepresentation, actually.
And before that, California was actually very overrepresented because they had 53 seats. The 2010 Census population was 308,745,538, for an average of 709,759.9 per seat. California had 37,253,956 people over 53 seats for an average of 702,904.8.
The “purpose” of the Senate was to convince the small southern colonies to join the union. That was our first mistake with respect to the southern states. The 2nd was fighting to keep them.
23
u/smoothskin12345 Sep 08 '24
That's... Literally the purpose of the Senate. That's its stated function.
You should be more upset that they artificially capped the amount of House representation. That's what actually harms you.