The generally accepted solution, as I understand it, is to shrink DC to being basically the national mall and some federal buildings, and then create a new state out of the remainder, which would include essentially all of the population. Voila, 2 senators and a representative.
You get a funny outcome where rump seat of government DC and DC State each have 3 electoral votes, but thems the breaks, I guess.
If DC is not allowed to become a state, then Wyoming should lose its Senate representation as well, since they have 20% less population than Washington DC.
If we complain about oversized influence of Wyoming in the Senate, why do we want to create another group of people who have that same oversized influence?
Just because you guys think that new group will agree with you? That’s not a particularly good argument.
Because they are human beings who currently have no representation?
I don’t think people are so much complaining about Wyoming as pointing out that a small population having 2 senators is something we already accept, where as a small population having 0 senators is something we shouldn’t accept.
And yes there is also something to the angle of how those people will likely vote, but that’s a two birds with one stone situation- it so happens our 2 party system leaves one party a ridiculous hill to climb in getting control of the senate, and that is extremely bad news for actually governing. It is utterly bananas that Biden could quite easily win a historic landslide and still not have a senate to work with to implement that mandate. DC statehood would still leave future senate prospects pretty lopsided, but its a start.
People here absolutely have complained about States like Wyoming having outsized influence in the Senate. Repeatedly.
What would happen if, somehow, DC became gentrified to the extent that your team doesn’t actually have an electoral advantage there anymore?
Until such time that the Senate is abolished (read: never) the people of DC deserve representation. It’s really not a difficult concept to grasp.
Oh, I’m sure they have complained about tiny states, and I would guess most people around here would generally be cool with rebooting the senate to be more proportional (and presumably adding DC voters ins some way at the same time). But that kind of foundational change isn’t going to happen.
What everyone would be saying if DC were strongly republican is fine as a thought experiment, but doubly in fantasy territory as McConnell would have ratified it long ago if it were.
I do stand by the concept, however, that even if one of the parties weren’t insane enough to elect trump, it would be a bad idea to leave a lopsided senate in a 2 party system where only the wildest of swings lets one of the parties actually govern.
You could achieve the same effect by simply abandoning the filibuster, which the Senate can do at will.
How would that help if the minority still has a majority vote?
Eh, you’re still going to have to take the majority, just not a super majority.
And that really should be possible.
Actually, no you can’t, I’m going to relink this article.
Why I keep saying lopsided is that its not just that either party can filibuster the brakes on (frankly I’m hoping/assuming the filibuster gets nuked around the same time DC would get in), its that modern demographics have evolved to give democrats a uniquely hard time capturing the senate even with massive popular vote advantages. To some degree this is working as designed, but historically we haven’t run into the problem before where the exact thing that the senate is meant to do gives a particular party a huge consistent advantage. And worryingly this does not feel like something either politics or demographics is likely to reverse in the foreseeable future.
Couldn’t you just… Try to win support from rural states?
Hell, the split isn’t even cleanly defined as it stands. Look at Pennsylvania. We’ve got one senator from each party. Same goes for West Virginia.
It’s only an insurmountable demographic problem if you are committed to not giving a shit about all those people in the middle of the country.
But that’s going to cause problems for you either way, even if you chose to try and simply ignore the will of those people, and cut them out of the Democratic process.
Trigger posted this interview in a different thread. Long interview worth reading all the way through. Here’s the relevant bit on why it will be harder and harder to win over the rural voters.
Long article/interview, but worth it. Very interesting
Look, I would prefer something more proportional, but I’m not opposed to appealing to the particular voters who happen to hold more power right now. I’m just frankly confused where to begin, how do you win the senators for the states where Trump still, in the midst of all this, is polling comfortably ahead? I’m truly, genuinely at a loss, I really don’t feel like you could just give more money for infrastructure
or something.
This is quite a take. It’s not like we, I don’t know, nominated a young, vibrant politician, a gifted orator, perhaps the most gifted one in a generation, and he ran on a platform of policies designed to help precisely those people, both in terms of their financial well-being and their actual, physical well-being, and, once in office, proceeded to do precisely what he had promised for them; or that, despite his efforts, the voters he meant to help succumbed to the nonstop bigotry and racism and hate preached by the other side, with the result that they decided he was a crypto-marxist-Muslim traitor to the country and helped usher in Republican control of the Senate once again.
Well, to be clear, that set of states is shrinking.
But like I said, Toomey is vulnerable here in PA, in 22. Even in a state like Texas, you are seeing shifts take place.
But for those Midwestern States? Those don’t have to be automatic gimmes to the GOP. Especially not the crazy current incarnation.
Look at that the GOP policies under Trump have done to farmers in the Midwest. That’s an opportunity for Democrats. Organized labor has traditionally been a strong point for Democrats in that region of the country.
I think that the Democrats can absolutely make inroads in those places, and then govern with a strong majority support. And that’s fine too be much more effective than just trying to marginalize large regions of the country.
This is the only way out that I can see for Democrats long term in the Senate. They somehow have to de-couple that trend he’s talking about in the interview I quoted. Despite being Democrats, they need to get rural voters to somehow pay more attention to the actual issues rather than what team they’re voting for. I have no idea how they would do that though, as it seems the trend is going the other way.
I think that part of it is that they need to win in 2020, and then implement actual competent policy that improved people’s lives.
It’s not actually that hard, if they make good policy that benefits those people.
I want to believe you, I really deeply do. But few of my interactions with people who still identify as republican give me hope that any sort of economic policy could possibly change their mind. Polling also seems to suggest policy per se is secondary- i.e. if Trump changes his mind on some spending or economic issue, republicans will also flip their views.
But perhaps more fundamentally, the situation is far more complex than simply ‘ignoring the democratic will’ of people from rural states. Our democratic system effectively ‘ignores the will’ of lots of people, it ignores the will of a majority of voters for president when they are not from the right states, it ‘ignores the will’ of 40% of the voters in a state when 60% think the other way, it without even quote marks ignores the will of people in DC and territories. In short, lots of people get left out as it is, I can think of no reasonable argument how more senate seats leaves out more people.