The U.S. Senate Isn’t Rigged

Professional journalists and Ivy League academics conflate winning elections with a “structural bias”.

The coalition Donald Trump assembled to get elected president was supposed to be implausible given the Republican Party’s purportedly shrinking base. Few realized that he was expanding it.

In hindsight, there was one election that foreshadowed what was to come. In the 2014 elections for the United States Senate, Republicans picked up nine seats, their best showing since they broke Democrats’ 26-year hold on the chamber in 1980. In 2014, the GOP won their first seat in West Virginia since the 1950s, a second seat in South Dakota for the first time since the 1980s, another in Iowa for the first time since the 1960s, and second seats in Louisiana and Arkansas for the first time since Reconstruction. Each of these states, despite casting Republican votes for president, were blue states. They had elected more Democrats than Republicans to the Senate, by wider average margins, since at least 1996. Further, Democratic administrations depended on the votes of senators from these states to advance their agendas. Today, amid a climate of casual delegitimization of American democratic institutions, Democratic losses in the U.S. Senate are curiously being recast as the result of a “structural advantage” that favors Republicans.

The United States is a multi-majoritarian federated democracy. Exercising legally-binding power that applies to all citizens of the federation requires meeting a higher threshold than a bare single majority. For much of the modern era, Democrats were the party of the U.S. Senate. They almost always earned an outsize number of Senate seats relative to their national vote share. Since the Senate revised filibuster rules in 1975 to make 60 votes the threshold, Democrats have twice earned supermajorities of that size and held more than 55 seats five times. Republicans have topped out at 55 seats.

But in a period of momentary polarization, Senate Democrats no longer have the broad cross-regional appeal they once did. In the Trump era, the stakes appear high and defeat feels a lot like a rigged game, and not just for the former president.

To be clear it isn’t elected Democrats nor the electorate who are passing off as exculpatory incongruent metrics that argue the Senate is rigged. Rather, it’s an insular corner of the press and Ivy League academics.

The first claim is that the U.S. Senate has a multi-percentage point bias toward Republicans. This is argued by finding the median net Republican margin of the last two presidential elections, with extra weight placed on a more recent election, relative to the national vote. Though the methodology for capturing a weighted average is sound, there are couple problems.

National metrics have no practical applicability as a baseline in a federation where the point is to represent the preferences of the people of the states, not conflate them with the preferences of the union. A state’s vote stands alone on its merits. Second, despite similar outcomes in partisan composition between presidential and senate elections, the data are not interchangeable. Which party is, on average, winning the Senate is determined by real Senate election results, specifically the average two-party margin of the last pair of elections in each state.

Based on data I’ve compiled from the last 100 full-term Senate races, the median state barely leans Democratic — by 0.4 points. This notably contrasts the performances of both President Biden and Hillary Clinton, both of whom lost the median state in their respective campaigns for president. Senate elections results and presidential election results are not interchangeable.

There is the argument that the Republican Senate majority is undemocratic because a majority of senators represent a minority of the union’s total population. By this logic, Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016 because he won states constituting a majority of the union’s population (which he did). The Senate’s detractors are correct, however, that the disparity between senate seats and population is by design. Equality in the Senate was hotly debated, passing by just one vote. James Madison, who was originally an opponent of the measure came around to supporting it, writing in Federalist No. 62:

“Larger States will always be able, by their power over the supplies, to defeat unreasonable exertions of this prerogative of the lesser States, and as the faculty and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable, it is not impossible that this [equal suffrage in the Senate] may be more convenient in practice than it appears to many in contemplation.”

So while Texas and Vermont may be granted equality in the Senate despite radically disparate populations, Texas is represented by 38 members of Congress to Vermont’s single member, and is among the top ten largest economies in the world. This prompts the question: how much more power should Texas have over federal decision-making?

Critics also argue that the Senate’s design is outdated because the disparity of the smallest state to the largest state has become far greater than at the founding. They warn of estimates that say 30 percent of the union’s population will elect some 70 percent of the Senate by the year 2040. However, a simple look at the data shows that, since the 1790 Census, roughly 30 percent of the union’s population have been electing 70 percent of the Senate. And while it is true the gap between the least and most populous states has grown since 1790, it has declined dramatically and now is at its lowest point since the Civil War. This isn’t a crisis for democracy much less one that has gotten worse.

Lastly, there’s the idea that the Senate underrepresents “people of color”. The assumption goes that since Republicans perform better in the lowest population states that are predominantly white, and Democrats perform better in the highest population states with comparatively higher shares of non-white Americans, white people are overrepresented. White overrepresentation, it is said, is why progress on climate change, gun violence, voting rights and immigration — all of which are coincidentally Democratic issues — have stalled in the Senate.

However, Democrats and Republicans currently split evenly the 20 senate seats across the 10 lowest population states, meaning Democrats are as advantaged as Republicans in the smallest and “whitest” states. In the highest population states, Democrats have the edge, 13 seats to the GOP’s seven seats. For whatever it’s worth, the top ten most populous states represented by Republicans are, on average, three percentage points less white than those represented by Democrats, according to the Census.

More to the point, data from recent elections show the nation is and has been racially—and geographically—depolarizing. Republicans are gaining in urban areas, and the share of racial minorities who vote Republican — and white, college-educated people who vote Democrat — have proven decisive when the margins are as tight as they are.

Depolarization disrupts a progressive premise that conflates the interests of a group based on race with a political party’s positions. In practice, critics overlook the diversity of racial minority groups, their agency, and mixed interests.

There is the implication that a proportional Senate would better represent “people of color” by disempowering overrepresented white people in small states. However, the bulk of the Senate Republicans’ caucus are midsize states and suburban states, not small and rural states. Second, in a reformed Senate, millions of racial minorities would be robbed of representation, including the two most historically oppressed constituencies in American history, Native Americans — in states like Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and South Dakota — and Black southerners — in states like Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. In haphazardly attempting to boost the influence of some Americans who live in often wealthier and better-resourced states, one winds up undermining the influence of other Americans, often in poorer states. More to the point, the partisan composition of a reapportioned Senate would be about as divided as the current one, in part because Republicans would likely gain representation in more Democratic-leaning states than Democrats would in Republican-leaning states.

The good news for Democrats and their supporters is that the last two federal elections demonstrated the party’s ability to course correct, particularly with suburban voters. But no party loses seats it held for a half-century because the map is rigged. Parties adapt, or they lose.

To a certain political addict losing elections will continue to mean that the fix is in, regardless of the metric, and regardless of their academic credentials. And if it isn’t the institution itself at fault, there are plenty of other scapegoats — voter fraud, voter suppression, misinformation, ballot harvesting, foreign interference, Facebook, undocumented immigrants, and so on.

Finally, critics may argue that structures like the Senate designed to impede federal power — however poorly it has done so — were never the founders’ true intentions but merely a product of begrudging compromise. This tellingly reinforces the case for the Senate and the states themselves. There was no viable alternative to compromise, but a framework that disperses power amid differing principles. Even if one were to believe the Founders’ intentions were to form a unitary state, after over two centuries it’d be worth asking whether these men who are so deified got that part right — just as we would of any other aspect of the order they established.

The banal truth is that no matter how one slices it the union is divided and Congress reflects this accurately. The way Democrats and their media and academia surrogates can regain an advantage for their cause is not to delegitimize American institutions arguing that they’re rigged nor is it throwing a petulant fit at the slightest encounter with electoral adversity. Instead, it would be to do what Democrats had done for the better part of the last century: persuade more voters and win more elections.

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