our political system is truly defective when the gop majority [View all]

[drray23]

in the senate only represents one third of the us population. Its even more dismal if you factor in how many voters that actually is..

The Republicans’ new talking point, unveiled yesterday by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, in an appearance on ABC News’ This Week, is that a bipartisan approach to enacting the stimulus package is important because Republican senators “represent half the American population.”

Now, that didn’t sound right, given that most of America’s big states have two Democratic senators. So I did a quick-and-dirty calculation of how many Americans the senators in each party represent, assuming that each senator represents all of the people in his or her state and that the currently open Senate seats (like Delaware, Illinois, and New York) will be filled by someone from the same party. And what you find, if you do the math, is that Republican senators actually represent about thirty-seven per cent of Americans.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/how-many-voters-do-senators-represent