General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A RedState WYite/Dakotan/Alaskan Has 40 TIMES the Polit.Power In The Senate As A BlueState Cali/NYer [View all]SuprstitionAintthWay
(386 posts)One can do very many different sorts of analyses like these, of course. Individual states, combinations of states, ...all states.
I chose to compare "largest two's" to "smallest four's" because it illustrates well how a very few (3, and 4) million Americans' senators, just because of where their citizens live, wield not just AS much power, but TWICE as much power in the Senate as VERY MANY (59, and 51 or 40) millions of other Americans' senators. The 3 million outgun the 59 million, 8 senators to 4.
(I'm sure someplace on the internet someone has calculated for the whole nation the average number of constituents per Democratic senator versus Republican senator for the whole nation. The blue senators' avg number is quite a bit higher. It'd just take some more calculating, or a spreadsheet, to quantify.)
Here's Wikipedia's 2019 state population table, try some yourselves.
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population
If you want to pare it down to the single starkest power imbalance in this awful system, it's easy to compare one California resident's political weight in the Senate to one Wyoming resident's. That ratio is 1 to 68.4.
The average Californian has 1/68th the political power in the U.S. Senate as the average Wyomingite does.
One man, one vote?
Nice thought. As for reality,
How about one Wyomingite, one vote,
One Californian, 1/68th of a vote.
And thanks to John Roberts' "Citizens United" decision, let's toss in one clandestine billionaire, a few million votes.