Fair?

[kentuck]

North and South Dakota combined have a population of less than two million people. Combined, they have 4 Senators.

California has a population of about 40 million people. They have two Senators.

Wyoming has a population of about 600,000 people. They also have two Senators.

Is that fair?

Yet, Republicans tear their hair out worrying that some immigrants are going to move into "sanctuary cities" and give the Democrats more votes?

[guillaumeb]

1. It was never designed to be fair.

And it has been used by the racists in the GOP to allow a racist minority to rule the majority.

[hlthe2b]

2. WY, ND and SD have only one Congressional Rep each, though

while California has 53.

I have gone back and forth on whether the Senate is really fair--currently, the argument would clearly fall on NO, but that is the system the Founding Fathers imagined--or more to the point the compromise reached. It will be hard to change.

[kentuck]

3. Give the big states more Senators or give the little states less Senators...

And put Mitch McConnell out of a job.

[No Vested Interest]

4. Wondering why we have two Dakotas. Wouldn't one big Dakota be enough?

(Sorry, Dakotans- don't mean to denigrate your states, but, really.....)
What were they thinking?

[melm00se]

5. Get thee to Federalist #62

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp

This gives the arguments for the Senate.

[Midnightwalk]

6. It wasn't designed for current population disparity

Here are some numbers:

[link:https://web.viu.ca/davies/h320/population.colonies.htm|]

Eyeballing the numbers the ratio of most to least popuated was around 10 to 1 in 1780

Virginia 528K
Kentucky 45K

Not counting African Americans and ignoring Tennessee at 10000. Tennesse grew by 10x from 1770 and wasn’t one of the original states in 1792 so they are a little bit of a wild card. I couldn’t find what their population was at statehood

Adding in the African American numbers makes it closer to 15 to 1
Virginia 760K
Delaware 48K

Your numbers of 40M in CA vs 600K WY is around nd 70 to 1.

The more interesting comparison would be percentage of national population in the the least populous 50% of states to the most populous states. I think that would better show how skewed it has become.

But it’s the system we inherited. To change it we need to win nationally which means we have to win in those states. That is frustrating to progressives but absolutely critical for us to understand. In the current political environment a constitutional convention would be an absolute disaster.

We can do what we want at a state level in blue states. To do things nationally we have to win more states and that means we won’t get everything we want.

Losing nationally means we get nothing of what we want.