Who is designed to favor small states

The sheer disparity in size between the largest and smallest states is the most visible source of questions about the Senate's democratic legitimacy. That divergence is sometimes summarized as the ratio between California and Wyoming, the largest and smallest states: Each California senator represents nearly Republicans and Harley-Davidson have a similar problem. They're dealing with it in opposite ways. Yet even that contrast, while gaping, probably doesn't capture the central force that could significantly heighten tension over the Senate's structure in the years ahead.

The real rub could be the widening divergence between the large and small states, not only in their partisan leanings, but also in their exposure to the most powerful forces reshaping American life in the 21st century. Critically, the small states tend to be less touched than the large ones by the nation's growing racial and religious diversity.

Many of the smaller states remain more white and native-born than the nation overall. Wyoming, the smallest state, for instance, ranks 46th in the share of immigrants in its population and 43rd in the share of its under population that is nonwhite. North Dakota and South Dakota, also in the five smallest states, rank 46th and 43rd respectively in immigrant population, and 42nd and 38th in the nonwhite share of their youth population.

Montana and Maine, among the 10 smallest states, rank in the bottom 10 on both categories as well. Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont and Idaho are among the other small states that rank relatively low in both categories too. Minorities have less representation in Senate. David Shor, a senior analyst at Civis Analytics, a Democratic-oriented data consulting firm, has quantified how the Senate has increasingly diluted the electoral impact of minority voters over time.

Using a statistical technique that compares the minority share of the population in each state to the minority share of the nation's overall population, he found that minority voters are more underrepresented in the Senate today than at any point since Projections by Robert Griffin of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute show that minority underrepresentation is on track to widen further for at least the next 40 years as the nation grows more diverse.

The reason for this growing gap, Shor explains, is that the minority population, particularly immigrants and their children, are concentrating in the largest states already disadvantaged by the Senate's structure, while the predominantly white and smaller states that gain under the rules are diversifying much more slowly. That means the racial implications of the Senate's small state bias will only grow as the US continues its transition into a majority nonwhite nation through the next quarter century or so.

Because that growing nonwhite population is concentrated in relatively fewer states, their influence in the Senate will be enduringly constrained. GOP increasingly opposes legal -- not just illegal -- immigration. Beyond race, other factors are separating the large and small states. The small states tend to be more rural albeit with some notable exceptions, such as heavily urbanized Rhode Island, Nevada and Delaware , according to census figures analyzed by The Daily Yonder, a website that focuses on rural issues.

Smaller states, with very few exceptions, tend to rank lower in the share of their jobs that require a high level of digital skill, a key measure of engagement with the information economy, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. And even as white Christians have fallen to just over two-fifths of the nation's population, they remain a considerably larger share in many of the smaller states, such as West Virginia, South and North Dakota, Maine, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas and Idaho, according to surveys by the PRRI.

Small state advantage extends through US government. All these dynamics now intertwine to produce a Senate that is structurally tilted to advantage the portions of America least touched by -- and in many ways most hostile to -- the big social and economic changes remaking American society.

Because of the Senate's role in determining Electoral College votes and confirming justices, its bias toward those states reverberates through those dimensions of political power as well. So it's all linked. James Madison, the Constitution's principal architect, bitterly opposed equal representation for every state in the Senate; the dispute over population-based versus equal Senate representation proved the most difficult for the framers to resolve.

As Lee notes, equal representation in the Senate was decided only on a vote of the states, with Massachusetts' delegation divided, on July 16, Madison viewed equal Senate representation as unfair to voters in the largest states, but even he did not imagine that small and large states would consistently diverge in so many ways -- not only in their political preference but also in their social and economic structure. As Lee and her co-author, Bruce Oppenheimer, recount in "Sizing Up the Senate," Madison tried to assuage small state fears by noting that the era's largest states -- Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania -- were wildly different in their religions, manners and agricultural economies.

The connection that may decide isn't what you think. Even today, "equality of size" doesn't ensure that states lean the same way politically. But that sorting by size seems likely to accelerate as Democratic-leaning minority groups and whites working in the information economy concentrate in the largest states, and Republicans grow more dominant among blue-collar, older, rural and religious whites who predominate in smaller states.

The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines , and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan small-state bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican.

One way to observe this growing partisan bias in the Senate is to compare the party makeup of senators elected to represent the 15 most populous states which have collectively housed about two-thirds of population since the turn of the 20th century to the partisan makeup of senators elected to represent the 25 least populous states which have collectively housed roughly a sixth of the population consistently since the s.

As the chart below shows, the partisan makeup of the Senate was fairly even until the s, when Republicans started to amass a partisan advantage in less populated states. What happened? Much of this follows from the post-civil rights realignment of American partisan politics , in which the Democratic Party became more consistently liberal and thus more appealing in big, largely urban states , and the Republican Party became more consistently conservative and thus more appealing in small, largely rural states.

But that gap has also widened in recent years, especially starting in , when Republicans took back a Senate majority, flipping seats in small states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Arkansas, Alaska and Montana — all states that will be tough for Democrats to regain in And what this has meant practically is that Republicans now hold a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans, as you can see in the chart below.

This imbalance is significant because it poses a real obstacle to Democrats taking back a Senate majority in Even if D. For the first half of the 19th century, the Senate was a bulwark for the South , with an equal balance of slave and free states despite the growing Northern population advantage.

And thanks to the way the American two-party system developed in the 20th century, with Democrats and Republicans both containing urban liberal and rural conservative wings, the small-state bias of the Senate never became a real partisan issue — until now.