The NY Times discovers the Senate and the Great Compromise; hilarity ensues.
Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate
The
disproportionate power enjoyed in the Senate by small states is playing
a growing role in the political dynamic on issues as varied as gun
control, immigration and campaign finance.
Gun control? Gun control is DOA in the much more representative House of, well, Representatives. Their mysterious assertion is unaddressed in the article. As a Psychic Reader, my contribution is to guess that their argument would have been the Democratic Party carrries the baggage of having some Red State Senators who can't afford to hop on the next Progressive Train leaving the station. Of course, that doesn't explain Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose home state went for Obama.
Oh, wait - did I mention that the Democrats control the Senate but not the more representative House? Yes, that is like totally obvi, but then again, the Times piece includes puzzles such as this:
There is a widening demographic split, too, with the larger states
becoming more urban and liberal, and the smaller ones remaining rural
and conservative, which lends a new significance to the disparity in
their political power.
...
Beyond influencing government spending, these shifts generally benefit conservative causes and hurt liberal ones.
Hmm. We also get this time warp as an illustration of something or other:
A sweeping climate bill, meant to raise the cost of carbon emissions,
passed the House, where seats are allocated by population, but not the
Senate.
Are you thinking that must be the Nancy Pelosi led House that was flushed out in the 2010 election? Right you are! But vindication waits until the last paragraph:
In 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly approved a bill to
address climate change, but only after months of horse-trading that
granted concessions and money to rural states. That was an example, Mr.
Broz and Mr. Maliniak said, of compensating rural residents for the
burdens of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
But it was not enough. The bill died in the Senate.
More here from the lib-friendly Center for Americn Progress. The Democrats controlled the Senbate but they didn't control the Democrats, some of whom could not be convinced of the wisdom of raising the cost of energy during a hideous recession. Go figure.
We see the potential for some fuzzy math in a comparison of Federal aid to New York and Vermont:
RUTLAND, Vt. — In the four years after the financial crisis struck, a
great wave of federal stimulus money washed over Rutland County. It
helped pay for bridges, roads, preschool programs, a community health
center, buses and fire trucks, water mains and tanks, even a project to
make sure fish could still swim down the river while a bridge was being
rebuilt.
Just down Route 4, at the New York border, the landscape abruptly
turns from spiffy to scruffy. Washington County, N.Y., which is home to
about 60,000 people — just as Rutland is — saw only a quarter as much
money.
I think some would argue that New York state got a disproportionate benefit from the TARP bailout funds, which are separate from the stimulus program. Well, unless someone can think of a big Vermont bank that got propped up, thereby saving jobs in Burlington or Montpelier or wherever.
Finally, they Keep Fear Alive with this combination of speculative fiction and ignorance about the outsize importance of small states in the Electoral College:
In 2000, had electoral votes been allocated by population, without the
two-vote bonuses, Al Gore would have prevailed over George W. Bush. Alexander Keyssar,
a historian of democracy at Harvard, said he would not be surprised if
another Republican candidate won the presidency while losing the popular
vote in coming decades, given the structure of the Electoral College.
First, the claim about 2000 assumes, quite improbaly, that neither party would have adjusted their campaigning strategy to reflect the new rules.
Secondly, I will see their Alexander Keysar and raise them a Nate Silver, who notes that for the next two elections at least, the Democrats seem to have nailed down an Electoral College advantage:
President Obama won the Electoral College fairly decisively last year
despite a margin of just 3.8 percentage points in the national popular
vote. In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney. The “tipping-point state”
in the election — the one that provided Mr. Obama with his decisive
270th electoral vote — was Colorado, which Mr. Obama won by 5.4
percentage points. If all states had shifted toward Mr. Romney by 5.3
percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won Colorado and therefore
the Electoral College — despite losing the national popular vote by 1.5
points.
Interestingly, the Republicans seem to enjoy at the state level the same edge the Democrats now enjoy nationally. Back to Mr. Silver:
Contrast this Democratic advantage in the Electoral College with the
Republican advantage in the House of Representatives. Democrats actually
won slightly more votes in the House elections last year (about 59.5
million votes to the G.O.P.’s 58 million). Nevertheless, Republicans
maintained a 234-201 majority in the House, losing only eight seats.
However, much or most of the Republican advantage in the House results from geography
rather than deliberate attempts to gerrymander districts. Liberals tend
to cluster in dense urban centers, creating districts in which
Democrats might earn as much as 80 or 90 percent of the vote. In
contrast, even the most conservative districts in the country tend not to give more than about 70 or 75 percent of their vote to Republicans.
This means that Democrats have more wasted votes in the cities than
Republicans do in the countryside, depriving Democrats of votes at the
margin in swing districts. Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would reduce the G.O.P.’s advantage in the House but not eliminate it.
But nationally, the Republicans are becoming inefficiently Red:
Missouri, once a tossup, is now solidly Republican. And West
Virginia, which was once Democratic-leaning enough that Michael Dukakis
carried it in 1988, voted for Mr. Romney by 27 points on Tuesday.
The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others
like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such
large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in
terms of the Electoral College.
By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both
traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like
Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two
elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would
probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are
favored in them.
Fascinating. In a future piece I am sure that Times will explain to us why the House is not representative either. But will they link to their preferred Electoral map?
SINCE YOU ASK: When I am King for a Day I will have gerrymandering reform coupled with implementation of the Congressional Distrcit method of determining a state's Electoral College vote (as in Maine and Nebraska, it is winner take all by Congressional district, with the popular vite winner in the state getting the two Senator bonus). The big benefit - what happens in Vegas statys in Vegas; with the national popular vote, vote fraud anywhere can affect the outcome everywhere, so every district dominated by one party has an incentive to cheat. With winner take all by distict, the value to running up the score fraudulently can only be the two bonus popular vote seats for that state.
Well, my unicorn is saddled up and ready to ride...
TOTALLY FREE-ASSOCIATING NOW: As KfoD I will also be imposing a whopping sugar tax, so enjoy those overly sweetened foods now. I will recycle the revenue by way of Medicaid and/or the payroll tax to mitiagte the regressive impact. So keep that on your list of things that won't be happening anytime soon (But ought to! And eventually will, or so I say).
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