Theorycrafting: A Proportional Senate (READ REPLY 5)
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Author Topic: Theorycrafting: A Proportional Senate (READ REPLY 5)  (Read 1591 times)
Blackacre
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« on: July 17, 2018, 08:05:57 PM »
« edited: July 22, 2018, 06:57:58 PM by Spenstar »

Edit: This is my 2,100th post! Yay!!
Edit2: Read Reply 5 for a more current iteration!

So I've made noise about this before, in Discord servers and in Atlas posts, about my issues with the Senate and what my idealized version of it would look like. But I may as well just get all of my thoughts onto one place, so here goes. (most of my population estimates will use the 2010 census)

I have two main issues with the Senate. The first is that the general idea of giving every state, no matter how small, the same representation is ludicrous. There are over 66 people in California for every 1 person in Wyoming; there is no reason for the two states to have the same power in the Senate. You can argue unique interests and balance between small states and large states as much as you want, but at the end of the day, the purpose of a legislature in a Republic is to represent the people of the nation it's supposed to be governing, and the Senate by its design does a horrible job of it.

I know, the Founders designed the Senate for a reason, to contrast the House as the People's chamber. The Senate is meant to be a deliberative body, something that is actually perfectly achieved with Senators having six-year terms which give them greater freedom to use their own judgement than members of the lower house. However, the Founders' intentions only go so far, for two reasons. One, at the nation's founding the gap between states was much smaller. In 1770 there were just over 19 people in the largest state (Virginia) for every 1 in the smallest state. (Georgia) Now I still think that kind of gap is too big for equal representation between the two, but the current gap between the smallest and largest state is more than 3 times larger! That kind of difference in scale was unheard of at the Constitutional Convention. The other reason is that we've deviated from the original vision of the Senate before in a way that made the Senate more accountable to the people: the 17th amendment.

That's the first issue I want to solve, but the second one is just as big and feeds into the first one's implications: the boundaries of the states themselves. Some states like California are too big for their own good despite being perfectly compatible with a clean split in two. Others, especially in the Mountain West and New England, are absurdly small and thus soak up way too much Senatorial overrepresentation. New England was kind of grandfathered in, but the imbalance in the West has no such excuse. Consider this: if you took the twin Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho and made them all into one state, it would have about 8 electoral votes and a population comparable to Louisiana and South Carolina. As is, that area has 5 times the Senate representation as a state with a similar number of people.

So I put way too much thought into how to fix this massive problem and came up with a two-pronged solution. Part 1 is obviously going to be changing the state boundaries, and Part 2 is going to be to change the way Senators are apportioned.

So here's my new state map:

In addition to what you see here, DC and Puerto Rico are given statehood. In addition to those changes, we have the aforementioned 5 Mountain West states fused into one, California split in two, and Rhode Island absorbed into Connecticut.

What makes this work is that, while arguably you could say that the new state lines are aesthetically hideous, (it does look better if you leave Idaho alone and substitute Nebraska but eh) the new lines are still absolutely defensible. Again, those 5 western states combined have a similar population to South Carolina, which is a decently sized state, so it's not like I Frankenstined together an Illinois or something. Plus, they were all added to the union around the same time. Secondly, the split California? I didn't photoshop that boundary in. That is a perfectly straight line created where a state border didn't previously exist in an app where I couldn't split counties. Plus, the Southern California state is still the second most populous in the nation behind only Texas, while the Northern California state (which I have named Polk) is the 5th most populous.

As for the rest, DC and Puerto Rico get statehood so everyone has a voting representative in Congress, and Rhode Island is fused into Connecticut because Rhode Island is tiny and let's be real, it would not have gotten away with being its own state if it wasn't one of the original 13 colonies. I could have done the same to Delaware, but it lacked an obvious fusion partner, and the current configuration gets me 48 states. I wanted that because it was divisible by 3, which brings us to part 2.

We have 48 states now, which can be divided into 3 groups of 16. The first group is the 16 smallest states, who each only get one Senator. The second group would be the middle 16 states, which get the two that every state gets now under the current system. The third group consists of the 16 largest states, and they each get 3 Senators, one in each class. This creates a much more proportionate system while still keeping the Senate separate from the House. Senators still get 6 year terms and there is still a (smaller) imbalance that favors the smaller states. The smallest state in this configuration is Vermont, and the largest is Texas. Texas has over 40 times the population of Vermont but only 3 times the representation in the Senate, which means that one Vermonter's vote is still about 13.4x as powerful in the Senate as one Texan's vote. That's still mismatched, but it's actually a smaller mismatch than the 1770 example I mentioned earlier, and is 5 times better than what we currently have.

What about the partisan imbalance of the new map? I admit I could have done this in a way that was a bit less friendly to Democrats. I could have fused DC into Maryland and made Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire all one state, which would have left me with 45 states (still divisible by 3) with as many tiny blue states triaged as tiny red ones. The reason why I didn't is because the GOP advantage in the Senate as it currently exists isn't just because of those tiny western states. It's also because of less tiny but still disproportionately powerful (ie still small) states in the West and South, like Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, Alaska, Arkansas, and West Virginia. Those kinds of medium-small states don't exist in abundance on the Democratic side. If you want proof of the level of partisan equity in this distribution, just let me point out that, if you remove the states that were decided by 2 percentage points or less in 2016, there are just as many Senators from Clinton states as there are from Trump states in this distribution, with 41 each.


Here's a map to visualize that! The EV count is used here to represent how many Senators each state gets.

So, you might be asking, how would this affect certain congresses in the recent past, and what happens if a state overtakes another one in the census and the number of Senators each state gets has to change? Well, I made a spreadsheet. I did have to take some liberties with how Senate elections that didn't happen OTL would have gone, (like 2010 Virginia or 2014 Pennsylvania) and which Senate class to cut from the bottom 16 states. You... might come to different conclusions than I did, so I'll give you guys the spreadsheet so you can see for yourselves.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EGbGk12qNH_N2ZWY0AKZH7jpBkDlh6QwchcgzFobeC4/edit?usp=sharing

This does have several implications. For instance, in 2009 and 2010, rather than being just on the cusp of being able or unable to break a filibuster, Democrats can break a filibuster with room to spare, even after Scott Brown. Plus, while the Democratic Caucus still has Ben Nelson and probably Joe Lieberman to worry about, it lacks some of the conservative westerners like Kent Conrad and Mac Baucus. (actually the Mountain West fusion hurts Democrats in 2009 relative to the current configuration) So a lot more is able to be done, which means a bigger stimulus, cap and trade, probably the DREAM Act, etc.

It also affects things more recently. Democrats actually keep the Senate in 2014, 50 to 46, which means Reid gets to control the speed of Obama's judicial appointments and Scalia gets replaced by an Obama appointee. This also means Democrats have the Senate in 2017 and 2018, which would lead to a lot of standoffs between Schumer and Trump. Finally, while Nevada would no longer be a 2018 target for Dems, new targets open up in North Carolina and Georgia, plus Democrats would no longer have to worry about defending Tester or Heitkamp.

The reason for this Democratic Senatorial dominance is the same reason Democrats can even compete in the current Senate model, as tilted toward the GOP as it is. Assuming Doug Jones still gets elected, Democrats would have 5 Senators in Trump states, while the GOP would only have two Senators in Clinton states*. Plus, of the 14 Senators in states decided by 2 points or less in 2016, the count is 9 Democrats and 5 Republicans.

Finally, I want to talk about what would happen in this system when small states become big and big states become small. This didn't happen in the 2010 census, but it's set to in the 2020 census: Arizona will join the top 16 and Indiana will leave it. Here's how it'll work:

Going into 2020, Arizona would have a Class 1 and Class 3 Senator, and Indiana would have one in each class. After the census, Indiana would give Arizona its Class 2 Senator, the one AZ lacks. The Governor of Arizona would appoint someone to fill the newly created seat in January 2021, and there would be a special election to fill out the term in November of 2021. As for Indiana, well, Senators are elected to 6 year terms and I don't want to cut a term short. It would maintain its normally scheduled Class 2 Senate election in 2020, and the winner would serve a six year term. In 2026, that term would be up, and no new election will be held for that seat since that seat would no longer exist. This does mean that for 6 years the Senate will have 97 members instead of 96, but that's not a big downside anyway.

If you made it this far, thanks for sitting through my gigantic spiel on my idealized Senate. Props to you! Cheesy

*Cory Gardner and Susan Collins; I know that Heller and Capito in WV were victims of their states only having one Senator, but axing them wasn't intentional. My first priority was making sure each Class had 32 Senators each; I used RNG when deciding which Senator from the small states would stay, and went back later to equalize the number in each Class. I could have manipulated the class count to maximally benefit the GOP by swapping NV's Class 3 Seat with UT's Class 1 Seat and exchanging WV's Class 1 seat with Delaware's Class 2 Seat, but that's not the way the cookie crumbled, and even if I had done that, the identity of the majority leader would not have changed.
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razze
Junior Chimp
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« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2018, 10:00:33 AM »

Endorsed!
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Peanut
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« Reply #2 on: July 18, 2018, 12:24:44 PM »

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Not_Madigan
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« Reply #3 on: July 18, 2018, 02:49:57 PM »

Giant nerd

Nah I rather like this idea overall.
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Progressive Pessimist
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« Reply #4 on: July 18, 2018, 07:11:32 PM »

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Blackacre
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« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2018, 07:15:30 PM »
« Edited: August 29, 2018, 11:38:13 AM by Spenstar »

Hello! So since I made the first post, I've gone back and made some changes, additions, and corrections to my work. Now that most of that heavy lifting is done, I'd like to share the (as of now) final result with you guys, as well as the changes and additions that were made! HUGE shoutout to Not_Madigan, TedBessell, HCP, Razze, Technocracy Timmy, and YoungTexan, who all contributed to this project.

First off, I changed the map. The original version looked unsightly in the west, and it is a problem that I fused Mountain West states for being too small yet somehow saw fit to add DC as a separate state, even though it's smaller than most of them. So here's the new map!


First of all, DC is now part of Maryland rather than its own separate state. Second, I took the gigantic hideous Mountain West amalgamation and divided it into two states. The first, Dakota, is simply the twin Dakotas made into one, and is roughly as populous as Maine. The second, Idaho, takes the existing Idaho and adds Wyoming and Montana. It's about as populous as Iowa -- in fact, it being smaller actually gives Iowa a second Senate seat in the 2000 census, but in the 2010 census it leapfrogs Iowa and takes its second Senator.*

To visualize the partisan balance of this map, let's do the same thing we did earlier with the last map. This time, I'm considering a "swing state" as either a state that was within 5 points in 2012 OR 2016, or flipped between those two elections.**


Democratic states: 33
Republican states: 33
Swing states: 30

Yes, I will defend Virginia and Iowa as swing states; the only questionable one here is Maine. But anyway, there is no strong bias in this Senate formation toward either party. The only downside to the change is that, by giving up DC and splitting the Mountain West multitude, we traded one medium and one small state for two new small state, which pushes the threshold for extra senators down. Iowa, which always was limited to one Senator in the old map, gets a second one here until 2010, and Idaho (the smallest state post-2010 to get 2 senators) is barely any bigger. But that's not TOO big a price to pay for a massive aesthetic upgrade and a stronger case that this is an unbiased map.

Take a look at the spreadsheet to see a few Congressional formations under this map! I had to take some liberties with figuring out who would win elections that didn't happen in this universe, but I'll defend all of my choices.

I will admit, in deciding which Senator to cut from the 16 small states, I actually arranged it the way that maximally benefitted the Democratic Party... in 2009. Looking it over, I preserved Ben Nelson, Mark Begich, Jeanne Shaheen and Harry Reid, (though that one was intentional because I wanted to preserve important figures like Senate leaders and future Vice Presidents) but I'm not losing any sleep over it because in 2018, the choices actually matter very little. Republicans get Capito over Manchin, but Democrats get Cortez-Masto and Angus King. If you set aside the fact that I deliberately preserved Nevada Class 3 to protect a Senate leader, then it comes out to a wash.

The spreadsheet also shows two other things. One, what Congress would have looked like in 2005. I wanted to see if the GOP could ever have a majority in this map, and as it turns out, yes! In 2005 they control the Senate, 50 to 46. And second, it shows... some of the effect this has on the electoral college. By eliminating some small states and making others count for less while bolstering the big states, it flips the 2000 election to Al Gore. Not by much; flipping razor-thin Wisconsin restores the status quo, but it's still interesting to look at.***

And now, for the fun part, the part that makes the mods question whether this should be on the What-If board. Once again, this is in two parts. First off, new state names. Dakota and Idaho are pretty straightforward, but I did some name changes for the split Californias. Originally I had SoCal be California and NorCal be Polk, but that didn't feel right. Brainstorming other name ideas, I realized a problem: neither state should be named California because that's the name for the entire whole. Neither should get that title that belongs to the fusion.

So SoCal is now the State of Chaplin, (CH) named for Charlie Chaplin. NorCal is the State of Frémont, (FR) named for the first Republican Presidential nominee ever and named as such because this is the land of Atlasia and I had to.

Secondly, the really fun part. Dakota has to share one Senator for what we know as 2 states. Idaho gets 2 instead of the 6 it usually enjoys, and one of them only came into being after 2010. TX, FL, NY, FR, IL, PA, GA, OH, MI, NC, NJ, WA, VA, MA, and IN all get one extra Senator, PR gets 2, and Chaplin gets 3(!) due to California's two senators both being given to Frémont. So myself, Not_Madigan, TedBessell, HCP, Razze, Technocracy Timmy, and YoungTexan came up with a list of the people we feel would fill those spots.

Just for frame of reference, Class 1 Senators were elected in 2006 and 2012, Class 2 Senators in 2008 and 2014, and Class 3 Senators in 2010 and 2016. So here's the list!

Texas Class 3: George P. Bush, Elected in 2016 (R)
Chaplin Class 1: Before 2018, Susan Davis, Elected in 2000 (D)
  • After 2018, Toni Atkins (D) after 2018
Chaplin Class 2: Linda Sanchez, Elected in 2008 (D)
Chaplin Class 3: Kevin de León, Elected in 2016 (D)
Florida Class 2: Adam Putnam, Elected in 2014 (R)
New York Class 2: Gregory Meeks, Elected in 2002 (D)
(Frémont gets the existing CA Senators: Dianne Feinstein in Class 1 and Kamala Harris in Class 3)
Frémont Class 2: Barbara Lee, Elected in 2008 (D)
Pennsylvania Class 2: Joe Hoeffel, Elected in 2002 (D)
Illinois Class 1: Before 2018, Lisa Madigan, Elected in 2006 (D)
  • After 2018, Cheri Bustos (D)
Ohio Class 2: Jon Husted, Elected in 2014 (R)
Georgia Class 1: Jack Kingston, Elected in 2012 (R)
Michigan Class 3: Dan Kildee, Elected in 2016 (D)
North Carolina Class 1: Dan Forest, Elected in 2012 (R)
New Jersey Class 3: Frank Pallone, Elected in 1998 (D)
Virginia Class 3: Tom Periello, Elected in 2016 (D)
Washington State Class 2: Dow Constantine, Elected in 2014 (D)
Massachusetts Class 3: Deval Patrick, Elected in 2016 (D)
Indiana Class 2: Todd Rokita, Elected in 2014 (R)
Puerto Rico Class 1: Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, Elected in 2006 (D)
Puerto Rico Class 2: Pedro Pierluisi, Elected in 2008 (D)
Idaho Class 1: John Barrasso, Elected in 2006 (R)
Idaho Class 2: Steve Daines, Appointed in 2011 and Elected in 2011 (R)
Dakota Class 3: John Hoeven, Elected in 2010 (R)

For now, that's all we got! I'd love to hear thoughts, endorsements, questions, nitpicks, etc in the replies. In the what-ifs board, keep a lookout for Senate races from 2006 through 2016 and a 2018 battleground map under this map and distribution.

*Better explain how this works, since it's a little different from the Indiana/Arizona example in the OP. Idaho starts out with a single Class 1 Senator, and Iowa starts out with a Class 2 and Class 3. There's no obvious seat to switch over, so instead whichever seat is up first moves from IA to ID. After the 2010 census, that would be Class 2, as 2014 comes before 2016. With the seat decided, the rest plays out the same as the IN/AZ example in the OP.

**I will now defend Virginia as a swing state. While it wasn't within 5 in 2016, it was fewer than 5 points more Democratic than the nation that year, in addition to being within 5 in 2012. Plus, Tim Kaine was on the ticket. The VP nod typically nets their home state 2 extra points for their ticket. Remove those 2 points from Kaine's influence and HRC only has a 3 point cushion in the state -- less than the 5 point window and only a point to the left of the National Popular Vote.

***Don't worry Trumpists; while this changed EV allocation saves Al Gore, it is not NEARLY enough to save Crooked Hillary. I didn't run the numbers but Trump's EV lead is too big. The only thing it might do is reduce Trump's EV Count to below 300 in the 290s range and narrow the gap such that flipping Florida would have changed the outcome. But no, Trump still wins in 2016 with this allocation.
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