Senate Majorities

While reading an interesting analysis of the (poor) chances of health-care reform from Jay Cost this morning, I came across this note:

While I don’t think right versus wrong properly enter into considerations of reconciliation, I have noticed one particularly ridiculous moral argument in favor of reconciliation making the rounds. We are told that it promotes the ideal of a simple majority, which most people believe is normatively appropriate. Indeed, that is the common opinion— but the Senate is not a majoritarian institution! You could have a super-majority of 82 senators whose constituents still don’t amount to a majority of the United States population. So, what is the normative value of half-plus-one votes in an institution where votes are not pegged on population?

It’s one of those propositions that one hears and immediately doubts, somehow—even though Jay Cost is one of the great political number-crunchers kicking around these days.

Turns out, as near I can figure, the claim that a minority of the country could by represented by 82 senators is wrong. If you add up the Census Bureau’s 2009 estimates of population in the fifty states, the actual number is 86 senators.

Amazing. You could elect 86 senators with a minority of the population, as the bottom 43 states have fewer people, in total, than the top seven states. (Adding in the unrepresented D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., doesn’t make a mathematical difference; there aren’t enough quite people in those places to squeeze the figures up to 88 senators representing just under half the population.)