Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell welcomes some of the new white bread GOP senators-elect, all bearing Mitt Romney smiles, in his office on Capitol Hill. (photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
Senate's 46 Democrats Got 20 Million More Votes Than Its 54 Republicans
04 January 14
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Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice
President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class
includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a
54-46 majority in the Senate overall.
But here's a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans
across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan
Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote,
"the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total
of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican
caucus members received 47.1 million votes."
Here's what that looks like in chart form:
This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is
illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the
tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote
share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked
in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in
favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate
despite dramatic variance in population.
The Senate is a profoundly
anti-democratic body and should be abolished.
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