We're the popular party: Senate Democrats won over 23 million more votes than Republicans

Rss@dailykos.com (david Nir) · Friday, January 06, 2017, 12:43 pm

As any grade-schooler who’s studied the Constitution can tell you, the United States Senate is an abysmally unrepresentative body. California, the largest state, has 66 times the population of Wyoming, our smallest, yet both are entitled to the same number of senators: two. It’s a statistic that you’re already familiar with, on an intuitive level.

But here’s another way of thinking about the same problem that illustrates it even more vividly. The 48 members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, in their most recent respective elections dating back to 2012, collectively earned 78.4 million votes on their way to victory. Republicans, by contrast, won just 54.8 million votes—even though there are 52 of them.

In other words, Senate Democrats have gotten more than 23.5 million more votes than Republicans. In a head-to-head election, that would amount to a crushing 59-41 margin in percentage terms. But due to a grave injustice designed to perpetuate the power of slave-holders that’s been perpetrated down the generations, the party that’s earned a massive majority of support from the American public is in the minority in the Senate.

Yes, the Constitution was designed this way, but it’s a bad design—one that leaves the country hostage to the views of a tyrannical minority. Combined with the similarly unrepresentative Electoral College and a House that’s been gerrymandered beyond recognition by Republicans, the GOP has an undemocratic hammerlock on America.

But, as you dig deep for the strength to fight this inequity each and every day, remember these numbers. For one thing, they drive Republicans absolutely nuts. Just as Donald Trump hates hearing about how he lost the popular vote, Republicans can’t stand being reminded that their hold on the Senate is due to a series of historical accidents that’s left them with a fraction of the public support Democrats enjoy.

And that’s the other thing to bear in mind: We’re the popular ones. We have to fight against an unjust system to make sure our voices are given their due, but there are more people on our side than theirs—and the votes prove it.

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