The 2021 Senate Will be Unrepresentative
Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley
(AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS STORY IS AVAILABLE)
As of now, the Democrats are trailing Republicans 50–48 in their attempt to gain control of the U.S. Senate in 2021 — with the two Georgia run-offs set to decide the final tally. Although the Democrats have locked down fewer seats, they will definitely represent more people. Even if the Republicans win both Georgia seats, giving them a 52–48 majority, the states represented by Democratic, or Democrat-allied, senators will have a combined population of 12% more than the states Republicans represent: 191 million versus 171 million. If the Democrats win both Georgia seats they’ll only have half the Senate even as they represent states with a full 26% more people than the states represented by their Republican colleagues — 202 million compared to 160 million.
The unrepresentative nature of the U.S. Senate is not news. The current Senate, which will be in place until the beginning of January, is controlled by 53 Republicans from states with a combined population of 184 million people. The 47 Democratic senators represent states with 196 million people.
In addition, as we’ve documented elsewhere, no election changes the fact that people of color are underrepresented in the U.S. Senate. A chart from that earlier article is reproduced below. The upshot is that because the Black, Latinx and Asian residents are disproportionately concentrated in large states which have the same number of senators as whiter smaller states, these Americans have much less representation than their white compatriots.
If the Democrats do get to even in the Senate, with Vice-President Harris having a tie-breaking vote, there will be agitation to partially address this by adding Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states, gaining their residents the representation in the Senate which their fellow Americans already enjoy. The impact of this on representation by demographic group can be seen in the table below — reproduced from another prior article. Adding these states and their senators helps with representation but doesn’t completely remedy the situation.
The assumption is that, at least in the short run, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would elect Democrats to the Senate. Democrats would, however, still be at a disadvantage. They would, under this scenario, be representing states with 29% more population than Republicans but hold only 8% more Senate seats. In a Senate that was the same as the current one, except for adding senators from DC and Puerto Rico, the Republicans would still control the Senate with 53 seats to the Democrats 51— putting Democrats at a 4% deficit in Senate seats despite Democrats representing states with 9 percent more of the population.
If Democrats take the Senate after the Georgia runoffs, we’ll be closer to having a body representing the will of the people thanks to Vice-President Harris’s tie-breaking vote. We’d get still closer adding DC and Puerto Rico as states. The Senate would, however, still be unrepresentative. Fully correcting that will only happen with much more dramatic action, or if population shifts or changes in voter preferences change the Senate map to be less skewed.
