Pirate's Cove

This comes to us from Patrick J. Egan in The Monkey Cage…hey, wait, wouldn’t that be considered racist if on a Conservative website?

Welcome to the most unrepresentative Senate election since World War II

With less than 24 hours to go before Election Day, confidence is growing that Republicans are poised to win enough of the battleground Senate races to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. In the aftermath, politicians and pundits will be assessing the Senate elections for signs of national sentiment about President Obama, the two parties and the policies they should pursue in Washington. (In fact, they’re already doing so.)

Regardless of the results, we should use caution in interpreting this year’s Senate elections as reflecting the views of the entire nation. Two aspects of the U.S. Constitution’s rules on Senate elections make it possible that the political leanings of the Senate seats up in any particular year will be unrepresentative of the nation as a whole.

Getting beyond the notion that this is simply moonbat whining about the Dems losing control of the Senate, Senators are not supposed to be representative of the nation as a whole. They were meant to represent their States. Period. That’s why the Framers of the Constitution set it up so that the State legislatures appointed Senators, rather than direct election. With the 17th Amendment, the power was put in directly in the hands of the people, and, let’s face it, Senators of both parties, no matter how much we might agree with them, fail in putting their States first over Party.

The first is by design: two Senate seats are allotted to each state, regardless of population. Americans living in Wyoming (the least populous state) have substantially more influence in the Senate than those living in heavyweight states such as California or Texas (which have 66 times and 45 times more people, respectively). Thus if one party draws its national strength from large-population states, in any given year it is more likely to face an unrepresentative number of tough Senate elections in smaller states. Currently, that party is the Democrats. The population of the median state won by Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election is about 5.5 million; the median state won by Mitt Romney has a population of 3.4 million.

Uh, not really. Refer back to Senators representing their States first and foremost. Second, yes, the idea was to make all states represented equally. Funny how liberals are upset about equality when it doesn’t help them, eh?

Then we get some whining about  the “election classes”, namely that one third of the Senate faces election every two years. And that’s just not fair to Democrats, you guys!

Democrats always say they love Democracy. Except when it interferes.