32,100,000 vs. 24,524,000

One way to look at last night's election is that the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That's a 13.4% margin of Democratic victory.

Comments

[David Graves]

And the numbers in the House are...? One could complain that there are in fact 435 individual races, that this isn't about a national referendum, but given what Bush ran on for the Republicans, one would be wrong....

[sd]

Weren't you arguing just the other day that micky kaus was mendacious (or was it stupid) for not factoring in to his argument the fact that democrats were defending a lot more seats in the senate this cycle than republicans? That fact, coupled with the natural advantages of incumbancy, explains a lot of this gap.

[trostky]

The Senate is "implicitly gerrymandered"? What natural advantage do Republicans have in small states? And how do Rhode Island, Vermont and Hawaii fit in that calculus?

[Barbara]

Implicit gerrymandering, I think, refers to the fact that a state gets two senators no matter how small its population is. Thus, the number of Rs and Ds elected does not always reflect the views of a majority of citizens at large. Obviously, the Constitution was designed for this implicit gerrymandering, but when the largest state probably has close to 1000 times the population of the smallest, the concept of representative democracy has stretched its meaning to the breaking point.

[andres]

Implicit gerrymandering of the Senate? Good God, Brad DeLong, there is hope for you after all. This is the first post I recall in which you explicitly criticize this country's governing framework, as opposed to its individual politicians.

It is exactly constitutional aspects such as the gerrymandering of the Senate, the lack of runoff elections, the lack of accountability of the President _within_ the Executive Branch, combined with institutional features such as campaign financing and the "in-the-tankness of the press corp" (which is not an accident) that has led to the disaster of the past six years.

And these problems, btw, also indicate that though the American people may be inherently conservative, they are _not_ inherently right-wing and militaristic. If there's any hope of fixing the current mess even after the apparent Democratic victory, it is in the increasing radicalization of people like Brad who would normally be in the political center. Best of luck.

[Bill]

Isn't the Democratic victory margin in this aggregate Senate vote much bigger than 13.4% ?

32,100,000 - 24,524,000 = 7,576,000

Thus, even if you divide this vote margin by the large number of 32,100,000, you get 23.6%.

[Barbara]

Sigh . . . I meant to say 100 times . . . California has around 40,000,000 people and states like the Dakotas and Wyoming have 600,000 or less.

[Felix]

trotsky is right, Barbara: Gerrymandering refers to fiddling around with borders in order to get the result you want. AFAIK no states' borders have been changed of late. I guess that when Brad calls it "implicit" he means that the borders favor Republicans, but I can't see why they do, as trotsky points out -- they favor the smaller states, which are hardly natural Republican strongholds. And sd is right too -- if you have a Senate race in New York but not Texas, you can hardly start extrapolating to the nation as a whole.

[But we had Senate races in both New York *and* Texas...]

[Mo]

Here are the totals for the complete Senate, using Brad's numbers for last night:

Dem/Rep
21,428,784 18,665,605 02
37,645,909 38,164,089 04
32,100,000 24,524,000 06

91,174,693 81,353,694

Call it a ten-million seat majority.

[crack]

Way to split hairs trotsky and felix!

[jerry]

What was the Great Compromise of 1787, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/A_Great_Compromise.htm , if not an implicit gerry-mandering of the Senate?

I don't see Brad saying it was pro-Republican or con, but it is definitely a pro-rural and anti-urban power shifting.

[Neil']

The lack of emphasis on actual numbers of votes comes mostly from two strains: It's partly the SCLM's corporate slant on minimizing populist ways of interpreting what happens, and also the ingrained "republican government" obsession with the States as such being the unit of political expression, not (ironically, coming from "individualists") the individual voter.

[anne]

No Democratic Representative or Senator or Governor lost a race, and the gains by Democrats in state elections will allow for district drawing that will properly reflect voting preferences in future elections. A wonderful election. Wonderful.

Thanks to all, but I am struck by the remarkable courage and understanding and toughness of John Murtha.

[Ken Houghton]

If Anne is correct, and I have no reason to believe she isn't, this will mark the first time in history that one party took absolutely NO seats from the other.

[anne]

Ken Houghton from my understanding in right.

[trostky]

Obviously the Senate favors small states. Does "small state" -- which is not the same as rural, if we count Rhode Island and Delaware -- even implicitly equate to a particular political party?

The four largest states are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. If the Republicans had run a decent candidate in Florida instead of the loopy Katherine Harris, those four large (and thus under-represented) states' Senate delegations might well have been equally divided between the R's and the D's.

[anne]

This was a time when change came from the bottom, when an anti-war movement was reflected everywhere in voting though often neglected in press reflections. Republicans tried to run on the war and mask the reality of war, but people came to understand.

[arbogast]

What I like to savor is the extent to which the result emanated from hatred for a single individual, George Bush.

Recall that the Republicans (including Joe Liberman) did everything in their (considerable) power to blacken the name of Bill Clinton and failed miserably.

Without any help whatsoever from the Democrats or the media, George Bush has managed to earn the purest hatred of a large and growing majority of Americans.

Karl Rove's love at first sight for George is looking queerer and queerer.

[andres]

"Obviously the Senate favors small states. Does "small state" -- which is not the same as rural, if we count Rhode Island and Delaware -- even implicitly equate to a particular political party?"

It doesn't take a great deal of thought to make the connection, but let me spell it out for you.

Delaware and Rhode Island are states which are small due to geographical area rather than population--ie they're northeastern states. All non-northeast cases of small states are states which are small by virtue of population, not land area, ie they're rural.

Granted, there's nothing inherently Republican about a rural state with a small population. However, small rural states in this country tend to be (a) landlocked, (b) lacking in any significant manufacturing industries, and (c)have highly mechanized, non-labor intensive agriculture.

All of this adds up to the population of a small rural state being more homogeneous, and more lacking in foreign immigration, than that of a larger, urbanized states. In the case of the US, this means the average resident is more likely to be english-as-a-first-language, christian, and possibly also of anglo-saxon ancestry. This divide also applies to larger states--Austin TX is a rainbow city in many ways, but central Texas outside of Austin and San Antonio tends to be lily white and deeply christian.

And much as I hate to sound snobbish, the above characteristics of small rural states are more likely to lead to provincialism, to less knowledge about foreign affairs, and to anti-immigrant prejudice. And yes, foreign countries tend to have these characteristics in different forms. To take an extreme case, the Spanish Civil War was predominantly a war of rural, xenophobic, devoutly Catholic "red state" Spaniards against urbanized, cosmopolitan, and secular "blue state" Spaniards.

All you need to add to the above is a political party that consciously adheres to an anti-secular, quasi-xenophobic outlook, and voila, you get red meat voters voting red state political parties. It's not that difficult to work out, as you can see.

[jallabo]

Your point would be valid for the 2004 election, where the Republicans won the Senate by 19-15 despite losing the popular vote. This time it looks like a devastating 9-25 loss for them. Considering that this time for the Democrats was actually their strongest third of the Senate at stake the Republican majority is probably gone for the next 6 years at least.

[wkwillis]

Texas is already majority non southern white, and will be majority Hispanic in ten years, like California.

[JPF311]

"Gerrymander" is not really the right word to describe the inequality implicit in the design of the Senate. Except for the division (in the 1880s) of Dakota Territory into two Republican voting states, it's not as is anyone deliberately drew the state borders to include or exclude any particular sort of voters, which is what a gerrymander involves. Moreover, as someone else has pointed out there are some small states (RI, DE) where the Democrats benefit from the two-Senator rule (and they would certainly benefit even more if DC were allowed senators!); and some large, populous states (TX and FL) where the GOP is placed at disadvantage.

[andres]

From the NY Times page (www.nytimes.com):

"Breaking News 12:53 PM ET: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Intends to Resign, Republican Officials Told the A.P."

The first step is in place. Now let's see if Lieberman gets invited to become DefSecretary if Montana and Virginia go Democrat.

[trostky]

Andes,

Fair points. Thanks. On the other hand, your demographics don't really fit in the Mountain West -- as opposed to the Midwest. Arizona and New Mexico have pretty very populations. Colorado has the best educated population of the 50 states. Nevada isn't rural so much as empty -- almost all of the population lives in Las Vegas -- and the same holds to a lesser extent for other arid states west of the 100th Meridian.

On the other hand, those farm-state hayseeds in Iowa and Minnesota really do swing both ways.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Ohio and Michigan rejected the GOP and leaned way over toward a protectionist stance.

[Maynard Handley]

"Texas is already majority non southern white, and will be majority Hispanic in ten years, like California."

Majority non-white by
* population?
* citizens?
* citizens over 18?
* registered voters? or
* actual voters?

[TomC]

There were 33 Senate seats in play so the result was 24-9 Dems. So a 13.4% margin in votes yields a 45.5% margin in Senate seats.

[Bupa]

I’d like to help the well-meaning Bill with his math so any Republican or non-Americans who happens to be reading this blog won’t think we’re stupid.

32,100,000 - 24,524,000 = 7,576,000

32,100,000 + 24,524,000 = 56,624,000

7,576,000 / 56,624,000 = 0.13379…..which Brad correctly rounds to 13.4 percent.

Rumsfeld was the first to resign. Who will be the first to be arrested?

[mk]

TomC,

Good point. I guess some people think a 13.4% edge should give them 33-0 in the outcomes versus 24-9. There are legitimate critiques of gerrymandering. This isn't one of them.

[wkwillis]

Maynard
In that order. It's already majority Hispanic in schoolchildren. The others depend on whether the Republicans give the illegals green cards and then the Democrats retaliate by giving them citizenship so they can vote.
But it won't be majority Hispanic voters in the next presidential election. Maybe the one after that, if the Republicans do the green card thing and the Democrats retaliate.

[BillCross]

It was the midwest, particularly agricultural states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, South dakota, that led the original progressive movement of the late 1800s.

Most of these states still don't show that much favoritism for one party or another in statewide national elections. South Dakota, for instance, has only had a majority of its national representatives (Senate and house combined -- 4 total until 1983, 3 since) be Republican for 4 of the last 35 years

[David Graves]

On the decline of prairie populism (or why Kansas elects Sam Brownback) see Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" On the demographics of voters vs. residents, see the interesting paper by the Public Policy Institute of California on the difference between California's voters (especially those who actually turn out to vote) and the demogrphics of the population as a whole (short version: whiter by a lot, older by quite a bit, richer, better educated, more conservative by quite a bit.)

[piotr]

bupa: arithmetically speaking, good point, but politically, dead wrong. GOP will not regain its arithmetic abilities until they bury the cult of Ronald Reagan. Thus I guess that a stray Republican reader of these comments is still puzzled about all these numbers.

On topic: one result of having many agricultural states with small population is that a class of low income voters was bought off with agricultural subsidies, subsidized highway construction etc. and thus lulled into complacence with big-money corporate agenda.

[TomC]

mk,

Actually I think it's a 39.4% margin. Whatever the final percentage it's an artifact of the winner-take-all nature of Senate races.

[TomC]

Agh, actually my first calculation was correct. I'm too tired even for basic math right now...

[andres]

"It was the midwest, particularly agricultural states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, South dakota, that led the original progressive movement of the late 1800s.

Most of these states still don't show that much favoritism for one party or another in statewide national elections. South Dakota, for instance, has only had a majority of its national representatives (Senate and house combined -- 4 total until 1983, 3 since) be Republican for 4 of the last 35 years."

Very good point Bill. I should mention that in the late 1800's, the midwestern states had a larger proportion of the population relative to the rate of the country because farms were smaller in size and less mechanized, requiring more labor. But all of what I've described in my post above is a general tendency to which there are many exceptions. If militarism and zealous evangelism continue to scourge the Republican party, it's possible that even the rural midwestern states will reject them in favor of the Democrats. We shall see.

[anne]

Andres:

"If militarism and zealous evangelism continue to scourge the Republican party, it's possible that even the rural midwestern states will reject them in favor of the Democrats. We shall see."

There must continue to be a recognition of how self-destructive the occupation of Iraq has been and is. Destructive of Iraq, as well, but self-destructive.

[JonF]

Re: If militarism and zealous evangelism continue to scourge the Republican party

Militarism and zelaous evanglicalism are far more the hallmarks of the Southern states than they are of either the midwestern prairie states or the libertarian-minded mountain states.
There has, by the way, been something of a rising Democrat trend in the mountain west of late, except for Mormon Utah. Democrats ahve been doing well there, up to and including Jon Tester last night.

[anne]

JonF

"Militarism and zelaous evanglicalism are far more the hallmarks of the Southern states than they are of either the midwestern prairie states or the libertarian-minded mountain states."

Interesting surmise. Then, the question becomes whether values adoption will once again devolve about the rights envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt.

[JR]

Do these figures include Sanders and Lieberman voters as Democratic votes?

[anne]

Though districting will not come before the 2010 census, Democratic gains in states this year will give the advantage of already holding office to many running again in 2010. At least, this should make the future districting process more balanced or more advantageous to Democrats.