Gentrify the Great Plains

Gaming out the true absurdity of the US Senate and Electoral College

May 19, 2023

The Founding Fathers of the United States could never have foreseen the ways in which the world would change. When they established the Electoral College, in which states send electors to vote for presidents instead of counting the popular vote, their intention was to limit corruption. When they designed the Senate to include two senators from every state, regardless of population size, they intended for it to serve as a check and balance against the tyranny of the fickle majority. What they could not predict was the way in which the US would expand, both territoriality and in population, and how that population would be distributed. As we will see, what seemed sensible 230-some years ago has aged rather poorly.

The Founders did, however, have foresight enough to expect the unexpected. They christened their new Constitution with 10 amendments, and in doing so, set the precedent that this charter was not infallible scripture to be set in stone and slavishly worshiped for all time, but a living document. Every generation of Americans has faced new issues and challenges in an evolving world, and every generation has made changes to the Constitution to keep pace — except ours. There have been 27 amendments to the Constitution. Not counting the Bill of Rights, this averages to about one amendment every 13.5 years. But there has not been an amendment in over 30 years, and not a substantive one for over 50.1 We have lost our political dynamism and fallen into stagnation.

Opinions vary on whether the Electoral College and Senate are in need of change, and on what shape that change should take, if any, but the dysfunction and loss of faith their anachronistic design has produced are unanimously felt. Such debates are mostly moot, however. In this era of do-nothing partisan gridlock, the prospect of passing the kinds of major legislation needed to meaningfully reform these bodies, much less the constitutional amendments that would be required to abolish them, are comically remote pipe dreams. But our outmoded system is susceptible to being hypothetically gamed by coordinated mass internal migration. In other words, gentrifying the Great Plains.

Quantifying the Issue

When the Constitution was put into effect in 1789, the fledgling US had 3.9 million people spread over 13 states. The largest city was Philadelphia with 40,000 residents in its vicinity. The most populous state was Virginia at 747,000, and the least populous was Delaware with 59,000. In 2023, the US population is nearly 335 million spread over 50 states. The largest city is New York City with 8.8 million residents. The most populous state is California, at 39.5 million, and the least populous is Wyoming with 576,000.

The Founders recognized the trade-offs of the bargain they were making. Yes, Delaware received 12.6 times more representation than Virginia in the Senate, relative to population size. That was seen, at the time, as an acceptable cost for having a more deliberative check on raw majoritarianism. Fast forward to today, where a voter in desolate Wyoming has 68.5 times more representation in the Senate than the nearly 40 million Californians, and it’s worth asking whether the price tag has become too steep.

The value proposition is no better in the Electoral College. Because the majority of states are winner-take-all, delegates are awarded to the presidential candidate who wins, whether they carry 100 percent of the vote, or 70 percent, or 50.1 percent, or even less than 50 percent, if they win a plurality in a crowded field. For smaller states, this is a minor inefficiency in a nation the size of the US. In Delaware, for example, the margin of victory in 2020 was 96,000 votes. Where it becomes a problem is in larger states. 9.2 million people voted Republican in 2020 between California and New York State, but because both states went blue, those votes were essentially useless. And because these two states went blue by a healthy margin (over 60 percent in each), every Democratic voter beyond the 50.1 percent threshold, over 7 million people between the two, similarly might as well have stayed home. The end result is a system that functionally throws millions of votes away. This allows for dozens of scenarios in which a candidate can lose the popular vote but still win the Electoral College and become president — an outcome we’ve seen five times so far in US history, and twice since 2000 alone.

Politicizing the Issue

Even in the abstract, these are considerable problems worth worrying about, but they only grow more concerning in their particulars. The flaws of the Senate and Electoral College are different, but their outcomes are the same: both advantage rural over urban voters, and both advantage the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. It is for this reason that opinions fall neatly along party lines. Republicans, as one would expect, think that the Senate and Electoral College are just fine and dandy, while Democrats find them an affront to democratic values. While their attitude is most assuredly born out of self-interest and not first principles, the Democrats are unquestionably right. The Senate and Electoral College are undemocratic.2 That was, in part, the very point of them, but, maladaptive as they are to the modern world, it’s gotten out of hand.

Republicans love to whine that every election they lose is “rigged”, and in a sense they’re actually right, just not in the way they intend. The elections are rigged — in their own favor. The fact that Democrats consistently beat Republicans, despite the structural advantages putting a red thumb on the scale, is a testament to just how astoundingly unpopular the Republican Party is. Republicans have only won a single presidential popular vote since the 1980s, and not since 2004. If the Senate and Electoral College were abolished tomorrow, the GOP, absent a drastic change in vision, style, and policy, would dissolve into the wind like a resurrected mummy whose curse was broken. The fact that they are even relevant, much less competitive, owes primarily to the ways in which the US political system gives the GOP a favorable handicap. It’s a political handout. A right-wing participation trophy. Pro-Republican affirmative action. Democrats still manage to regularly clean their clock, but with some effort, they could deal the GOP a knockout blow from which they would never get up.

Gaming the Issue

There are millions of Dem voters in populous blue states whose votes currently mean next to nothing. There are also a number of sparsely populated states with political overrepresentation and tiny margins of control in absolute terms. What would happen if there were some kind of politically coordinated mass internal migration? Let’s break down a few numbers.

In 2020, about 271,000 Wyomans voted in their US Senate race. The Republican candidate won by a massive margin in terms of percentage — 73 percent to 27 percent — but in absolute terms, that’s only 125,000 votes. And the margin was even smaller in the 2020 presidential race, where Trump won by 120,000 votes. In 2020, North Dakota and South Dakota went for Trump by 120,000 and 110,000 votes, respectively, and the 2022 Senate races in the Dakotas went red by 75,000 and 151,000. These numbers are similar in Montana and Idaho. Looking just at the Senate, that’s a total margin of victory, across five red states, of about 600,000 votes, or about “one homeless encampment”, as Californians would put it.

On the other side of the political and geographical spectrum, California, New York, and New Jersey swung massively for the Dems in both Senate and presidential races by a cumulative margin of 3.2 million and 7.8 million votes, respectively. If 601,000 of them moved to the five rural states above in the right proportions, it would cause a blue swing of approximately 17 delegates in the Electoral College, seven seats in the House of Representatives, and a whopping 10 seat swing in the Senate.3 Added to this would be blue shifts in state and local races along with ballot measures.

To be clear, this is a fun, tongue-in-cheek hypothetical scenario designed to illustrate the absurdities of an outmoded system, but gaming this out is surprisingly less far-fetched than it might seem. The cost of living in large coastal blue states is sky-high. Crime in many of these cities is a problem, not to mention how crowded and congested everything is. Couple that with the rise of working from home, hipsterism, and the fact that people would be moving in bunches, and it’s not difficult to see why this prospect might appeal to some, wholly apart from political motivations, which would themselves be considerable. The construction and business boom it would cause in these states would create jobs, grow local economies, and boost home values. The long-term residents might despise the political implications, but their swelling pocketbooks would be a pretty nice consolation prize. Coordinating such a migration might simply entail planting the idea, convincing a few dozen high-profile people to do it, and trying to start a cultural snowball rolling.

Republicans would fight this at the state level, likely implementing delaying tactics that extend the period of time one must be a resident in order to vote in their states. There may even be incidents of violence during elections. There would be no counter migration from Republicans, however — they lack the numbers, and it’s difficult to imagine hundreds of thousands of people in the Bible Belt and Deep South moving across the country. In the end, Republicans would show up to the negotiating table, suddenly amenable to reforming or even abolishing the Senate and/or Electoral College.

More Conventional Options

Landing back on Earth from the realm of thought experiment, there are some more conventional approaches to improve or circumvent the effects of the Electoral College and Senate.

One option is splitting the electoral votes at the state level. Two states already do this: Nebraska and Maine. Instead of awarding all of a state’s Electoral College delegates to the winner, regardless of how razor-thin their margin of victory might be, this method splits the states into multiple districts where delegates are earned per district won. This means that if a candidate loses the overall state but still wins in one district, they walk away with something instead of nothing. Even if this system was adopted by all states, it is still possible for presidential candidates to lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College and become president, though it does make that possibility more narrow.

A way to circumvent the Electoral College altogether is through a national popular vote compact. This would be an agreement between states to direct their Electoral College delegates to cast ballots for whichever candidate won the popular vote nationwide, regardless of the results in their individual state. 15 states plus Washington DC have already passed this into law (all Democratic strongholds), adding up to 195 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win the Electoral College. If enough additional states totaling 75 or more electoral votes join this compact, it would be put into effect.

Another option is ranked-choice voting (RCV), where voters rank candidates by preference, marking their first choice, second, third, and so on. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, the bottom candidates are eliminated, and second choices of these candidates’ voters are activated. This process continues until one candidate wins an outright majority. This doesn’t change anything about the Electoral College or Senate, but it does offer voters more choice, softening the edges of the winner-take-all dynamic. Only two states currently use RCV broadly — Alaska and Maine — but a growing number of other states have adopted it in limited applications.

***

One sign of a flawed system that has not kept pace with a changing society is when it can be wildly gamed. The system, however, is not going to reform itself. We are, unfortunately, no longer the kind of thriving political society that can make big changes. But we can vote with our feet in the most literal sense. Republicans have long relished telling Democrats who rightly complain about our country’s problems to move away. They might just be right — but you don’t have to move all the way out of the country; just move to desolate red states and gentrify the frontier.

See also: “The Red Drizzle”

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The 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992 (202 years after it was proposed!) is a trivial matter, delaying the implementation of any salary change in Congress until after the subsequent election.

“We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” is a stupid person’s idea of a smart thing to say. A republic is a form of democratic government. If we’re not a democracy, why all the whining about stolen elections? Hey, we’re not a democracy!

Brief civics overview: there are 435 representatives in the House, but only 100 Senators in the Senate. So the House swing here would be modest, though not nothing. The Senate swing, however, would be enormous. The exact delegate/House figures might also fluctuate slightly as these things are periodically recalculated to reflect population size, unlike the Senate.