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Good at getting themselves elected:
Margin by which total votes for Democrats in the last three Senate elections exceeded those for Republicans: 2,900,000
Number of seats won by Democrats and Republicans, respectively: 46, 56
Bad at conducting wars:
Minimum number of Iraq war veterans who have declared they are running for Congress this year: 11
Number of these who are Democrats: 9
According to last month’s Harper’s Index.
But that’s the very raison d’etre of the Senate– to give states with smaller populations representation equal to that in the states with more people. If that’s a million votes per year, it’s really miniscule, considering that the US Population is nearing 300 million people, and if it’s an average over 3 years, it’s still not that suprising. Or am I missing something?
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Well, what’s potentially (admittedly only potentially) scandalous about that is that the discrepancy so consistently favors Republicans. The advantage in number of votes only moderately favors Democrats, true, but the Republicans enjoy a significant majority in the number of seats won. This would seem to suggest (though certainly by no means prove) that a minority of voters, far from being oppressed by the majority, is actually in a position to dictate public policy.
Coupled with the results of the last two presidential elections, these results ask provocative questions about the state of representative democracy in the United States. And for me, the most compelling of those questions is: Why does it seem that whenever we find such discrepancies, they always favor Republicans? Is it Republican malfeasance or Democratic incompetence? Both? Or something else?
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