Democrats Will Have To Overcome The Senate’s Republican Bias To Win A Majority
The Democrats are favored to win back control of the Senate. But even in a year in which Democrats are likely to win the popular vote by a hefty margin, they are at a significant disadvantage in the Senate because of the chamber’s small-state rural bias.
On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population. But for more than a century, that fact didn’t pose much of an issue in terms of which party won. Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate.
But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. It’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.
In fact, over the last four decades, Republicans have represented a majority of Americans just once — from 1997 to 1998. And yet, the GOP has held a Senate majority for 22 of the last 40 years.
If Democrats indeed gain control of the Senate, the question of statehood for Washington, D.C., will leap to prominence. After all, it’s not hard for Democrats to look at the last 40 years and believe that adding a low-population Democratic state is only fair.