Is this democracy?

On November 5, 2024, voters in the United States will choose new political representatives and leaders for their states and the nation. Since the U.S. has the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, the world watches its elections very closely.

But for a place whose leaders talk proudly about being a beacon of democracy, the U.S. isn’t perfectly democratic. It has a number of systems that make it so that leaders and laws the majority of its citizens support can easily lose out.

The House of Representatives?

The U.S. House of Representatives is one of two chambers of U.S. congress that create and vote on the country’s laws. Each of its 435 members represent a state district, and each state’s district total is tied, mostly, to its population.

We say „mostly“ because of two laws: 1) Every state gets one representative no matter its population and 2) There can’t be more than 435 representatives in the House.

Because of these rules, it’s impossible to perfectly match the percentage of U.S. population living in each state to its percentage of House members. For example, the least populated state, Wyoming, has 580,000 residents and the most populated state, California, has about 39,540,000. That means California has 68 times more people than Wyoming.

However, California’s say in the House is not 68 times larger than Wyoming’s. Wyoming has one representative in the House while California has 52.

The Senate 

The other chamber of U.S. congress is the Senate. Along with creating and passing laws, it approves nominations to the extremely powerful Supreme Court. 

The inequality of representation is even greater in the Senate than the House. It has 100 members: Two from each of the 50 states.

There, Wyomingites‘ representatives have exactly the same say as Californians‘. Similarly, about 780,000 North Dakotans hold equal power to just over 30 million Texans, 19.7 million New Yorkers, 10 million Michiganders, and many other states with far more people.

The current U.S. senate is evenly split with 50 members each from the two major parties in the country: the Republicans (Donald Trump’s party) and Democrats (Joe Biden and Kamala Harris‘ party). This equal power exists despite how Republican senators represent around 41.5 million fewer people (about 12% of the total U.S. population) than Democratic senators. 

The Electoral College

The Electoral College is a system where each state gets votes for president equal to its House and Senate representatives. Since each state has at least one House member and two Senators, no state has under three electoral votes.

Washington D.C. (not a state) also gets three electoral votes.

With 435 House members, 100 Senators, and D.C.’s three votes, there are 538 electoral votes. A majority of electoral votes wins the presidential election. If there’s a tie, the House chooses a winner.

This means that the same misrepresentative House and Senate systems also determine who wins the U.S. presidential election.

Additionally, almost all states (48 of 50) give all of their Electoral College votes to the candidate with the most overall votes in the state no matter if they win by a little or a lot – i.e., winning a state by 0.1% has the same result as winning it by 80%.  

This makes it so that people who live in states dominated by a single party often feel like their votes don’t matter and other states that are more evenly split receive far more attention from hopeful presidents.

The majority of the time, the person who has won the Electoral College has also won the most votes overall. Two notable and recent exceptions are George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote – Bush having about 450,000 fewer votes than his opponent, and Trump almost 4 million.

Want more? Let us know

You may be wondering how the U.S. system of representation came to be this way. We’d love to tell you, but we’ve run out of space for this month. 

If you’d like us to explore that history in a future Learning Nugget, let us know in a comment or email.