Re: Senate Majorities, Again

This theoretical victory stuff is always a fun game , Joe.

Actually, if you want to do it up right, you could get a majority—the twenty-six smallest states, fifty-two senators—with just 11,010,526 voters, or 3.62 percent of the population.

That’s based on the CIA Factbook ‘s estimate of the U.S. population in the second half of 2008 as 303,824,640, and the Census Bureau’s report of the numbers of people who actually voted, state by state, in the 2008 election. Given that the senatorial races are, in fact, staggered, so at least one in each state occurs in a non-presidential-election year (when the turnouts are lower), the number of theoretically necessary voters is even smaller.