I think the number is closer to 20. Look at the economic "gravity wells" of major cities and groups of cities. State borders should probably roughly align with those so you don't have people in places like Buffalo and Pittsburgh getting the shaft because the people who call the shots in NYC and Philly live in a totally different economic reality.
If you did it right you could keep the red/blue balance of power intact enough.
It will never happen because spinning up new state governments would represent a huge power (and then wealth) transfer away from the existing political class and professional managerial class who support them.
The problem isn’t the count, the problem is you have multiple states with populations of around 500k, that get two senators, and states like CA that have 40 million, that get two senators. More states does nothing to resolve the issue of the tiny states with no understanding of actual scale having a vastly outsized amount of control of the government.
To match the dakotas California would need to be split into something like 50 states.
What's most frustrating is it's all these asses claiming that US politics is controlled by cities and the coastal states, when the reality is that half the senate is made up almost entirely out of those tiny near-failed central states, giving those states 25-50x the control of the senate of anyone living in the big states. Disguising that is why those states insist on coloring entire states red or blue rather than showing the actual population counts - coloring them entirely blue or red is also needed to have the idea "this whole state votes team blue".
Yes friend, it's propaganda to deny rural areas have more political power than anywhere else. Their propaganda is well funded and has had great impact.
I am ok with breaking California into 50 states, many of them would vote red.
> I am ok with breaking California into 50 states, many of them would vote red.
If you assume 50 ex-California states would vote in similar proportions to California’s existing 58 counties, and base it on the 2020 Presidential election, the split would be roughly 31-19. With no other changes, that would take the current Senate from 51-49 to 111-87. The House is trickier to do, since you need the actual population of each state; Rs probably gain most because they'd get a bunch of new states benefitting from “you can’t get less than one House seat”, but a lot of that would be at the expense of non-California states rather than the ex-California blue states, who I think would also gain in the House. Net, I think Rs gain a little structural ground in the House, Dems gain a lot in the Senate (affecting appointments and treaties, as well as legislation), Electoral College, resolution of contested Presidential elections (voting on which in the House is by State), and passing (or blocking) Constitutional amendments .
The house was supposed to be a populist dumpster fire while the appointed senate represented the interests of the states themselves (like a UN council or something).
This all got ruined when senators became directly elected.
Increasing the number of Representatives would dilute the "Wyoming has 2 Senators" effect on the Electoral College, and it would allow fairer representation in states like Colorado. Denver is under represented, while the Western Slope district includes Pueblo, which has been an uneasy situation.
Why don't you advocate for the Constitution to be changed so states can freely leave if you get your wish to transfer even more power from the states to Washington, DC? In general, when one party wants to unilaterally change a previously agreed upon contract, the other party can exercise the right to withdraw from the contract entirely. Since the folks who want the country run by DC tend to hate those flyover states anyway and see them as a resource drain, they should be fully supportive and overjoyed at the opportunity to be rid of them.
In a representative democracy, we need to be able to know who our representatives are. They need to be elected or not based on their reputation. If we have 50,000 representatives, we can't possibly know who they all are on a personal level, or even know who all the representatives of our locality are.
Representation should not be based on population, but based on human capacity for remembering different people (cf. Dunbar's number).
Do you need to know the individual state legislatures for every state as well?
You’d only need to know those representing you, which would not change.
The purpose of the senate is to have a fixed knowable number of state representatives, while congress should allow for more fine-grain personal representation.
The fixed number of congressmen diminishes the intended difference of the two houses.
I initially thought this was a bad idea. If we followed GW's recommended ratio of 30,000 constituents to 1 representative, the house today would consist of ~10,000 representatives. Which seems ridiculous. You would need a sports stadium just to fit all of them in one place.
But as I think about it more, I'm coming around to the idea. Instead of voting in representatives that we are completely disconnected from, we would instead vote in representatives whom we have some form of personal connection with. 30,000 constituents is about the size of a medium-sized university. Whenever someone runs for office, you would most likely know someone who knows that person on a personal level. Someone who can either vouch for them, or tell you all their red flags. And as the author pointed out, candidates wouldn't need to worry about fundraising nearly as much, since they can rely on their personal network to campaign effectively.
In theory this should mean that the average representative would be smarter, more capable, and of better moral character. And a house comprised of smarter, more capable, and more morally upstanding representatives would function a lot better than what we have now.
The house would need to be fundamentally changed of course. The "office-oriented" culture would need to evolve into something that is more remote, decentralized, and distributed. And for starters, all voting would have to be done digitally. It would be a radical shift, but one that has real potential.
This is a long way of just saying the Federal Government is too large and needs less power over our lives. Government should be local, where you can have as smaller constituent to rep ratio.
> In theory this should mean that the average representative would be smarter, more capable, and of better moral character.
That's not what I would expect from theory. I'd expect it to make the representative more reflective of the intelligence, capability, and moral character of the constituents. If the constituents are deficient, they'll send deficient representatives.
I think you're suggesting that having representatives better known to the constituents would weed out misbehavior, but I believe it just means fewer eyes on them. If there are red flags, it only takes one person to notice, and can publicize it to all of the rest.
It's not that I'm opposed to expanding the House in this fashion. As HL Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." I believe that the problems we have stem from the voters themselves, not the mechanisms they use, and will not be fixed by any changes to those mechanics. Still, anything we do different is an opportunity to interrupt the vicious cycle of distrust that I think is the core problem.
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[ 96.0 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIf you did it right you could keep the red/blue balance of power intact enough.
It will never happen because spinning up new state governments would represent a huge power (and then wealth) transfer away from the existing political class and professional managerial class who support them.
What's most frustrating is it's all these asses claiming that US politics is controlled by cities and the coastal states, when the reality is that half the senate is made up almost entirely out of those tiny near-failed central states, giving those states 25-50x the control of the senate of anyone living in the big states. Disguising that is why those states insist on coloring entire states red or blue rather than showing the actual population counts - coloring them entirely blue or red is also needed to have the idea "this whole state votes team blue".
I am ok with breaking California into 50 states, many of them would vote red.
If you assume 50 ex-California states would vote in similar proportions to California’s existing 58 counties, and base it on the 2020 Presidential election, the split would be roughly 31-19. With no other changes, that would take the current Senate from 51-49 to 111-87. The House is trickier to do, since you need the actual population of each state; Rs probably gain most because they'd get a bunch of new states benefitting from “you can’t get less than one House seat”, but a lot of that would be at the expense of non-California states rather than the ex-California blue states, who I think would also gain in the House. Net, I think Rs gain a little structural ground in the House, Dems gain a lot in the Senate (affecting appointments and treaties, as well as legislation), Electoral College, resolution of contested Presidential elections (voting on which in the House is by State), and passing (or blocking) Constitutional amendments .
This all got ruined when senators became directly elected.
Representation should not be based on population, but based on human capacity for remembering different people (cf. Dunbar's number).
350 Reps is no better than 1100 from that aspect. Can't know them all.
You’d only need to know those representing you, which would not change.
The purpose of the senate is to have a fixed knowable number of state representatives, while congress should allow for more fine-grain personal representation. The fixed number of congressmen diminishes the intended difference of the two houses.
But as I think about it more, I'm coming around to the idea. Instead of voting in representatives that we are completely disconnected from, we would instead vote in representatives whom we have some form of personal connection with. 30,000 constituents is about the size of a medium-sized university. Whenever someone runs for office, you would most likely know someone who knows that person on a personal level. Someone who can either vouch for them, or tell you all their red flags. And as the author pointed out, candidates wouldn't need to worry about fundraising nearly as much, since they can rely on their personal network to campaign effectively.
In theory this should mean that the average representative would be smarter, more capable, and of better moral character. And a house comprised of smarter, more capable, and more morally upstanding representatives would function a lot better than what we have now.
The house would need to be fundamentally changed of course. The "office-oriented" culture would need to evolve into something that is more remote, decentralized, and distributed. And for starters, all voting would have to be done digitally. It would be a radical shift, but one that has real potential.
That's not what I would expect from theory. I'd expect it to make the representative more reflective of the intelligence, capability, and moral character of the constituents. If the constituents are deficient, they'll send deficient representatives.
I think you're suggesting that having representatives better known to the constituents would weed out misbehavior, but I believe it just means fewer eyes on them. If there are red flags, it only takes one person to notice, and can publicize it to all of the rest.
It's not that I'm opposed to expanding the House in this fashion. As HL Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." I believe that the problems we have stem from the voters themselves, not the mechanisms they use, and will not be fixed by any changes to those mechanics. Still, anything we do different is an opportunity to interrupt the vicious cycle of distrust that I think is the core problem.
https://archive.today/pOGhT