The hidden biases at play in the U.S. Senate
People of color get significantly less representation than White voters. And that’s not the only way the Senate is skewed.
The United States Senate was never designed to represent all people equally. But over recent decades, it has become unrepresentative in ways the founders could not have imagined.
In the negotiations that created the Constitution, the House was to be apportioned proportionally, based on the population of the state. When a proposal was offered to apportion the Senate in the same way, representatives from the less populated states objected.
The solution is what became known as the Great Compromise, a Senate that was designed to treat every state equally, regardless of population: two senators for the states with the least population, two senators for the states with the most population.
Imperfect Union
The new nation in 1790 consisted of 13 states arrayed along the Eastern Seaboard, with political parties still in their infancy. At that time, only White male landowners could vote. Today the United States is a transcontinental behemoth. It’s increasingly diverse, with the franchise open to adult citizens, regardless of race or landowning status. And it’s increasingly sorting itself along rigid partisan lines.
The result of the country’s evolution has been a Senate that suffers from three fundamental imbalances, according to a Washington Post data analysis of population growth, demographic changes and shifts in voting patterns.
First, the disparities in power among voters in different states have widened as states have grown unevenly. Second, because of demographic distribution, White voters now have substantially greater influence than voters of color. And finally, in recent decades, Republican senators have maintained majority control even when they represent a minority of Americans. That’s because more Republicans than Democrats are elected in the least populous states.
Though not the sole reason, these imbalances have contributed to the Senate’s inability to enact legislation that enjoys popular support, from voting rights to gun safety laws. Proposals with widespread support among voters of color have been particularly stymied. The Senate’s distortions are also a factor in perceptions, especially among people on the political left, that the Republican Party and its constituencies enjoy outsize power over essential democratic processes, including the confirmation of Supreme Court justices.
As the country continues to gain population and become more diverse, none of these phenomena appear to be going away.
Explosive but uneven growth
The first factor to consider in understanding the Senate’s imbalances is the sheer growth of the country and, particularly, where it’s been concentrated.
In 1790, Virginia, the most populous state, had roughly 13 times the population of Delaware, the least populous, with a difference of about 700,000 people.
But since 1960, the populations of America’s three most populous states, California, Texas and Florida, have all skyrocketed.
As a result, there is now a staggering difference in size between America’s most and least populous states. In 1960, the difference was just 17 million. But today, it’s 39 million. By 2040, that gap is expected to be 46 million.
This has created a representation problem in the Senate. If you are a resident of California, with 68 times the population of Wyoming, your influence in the Senate is paltry.
It’s not only the megastates. Citizens in states like Nevada, Arizona and Georgia have all seen their relative influence diminished as their populations have grown.
Underrepresented people of color
This imbalance in power due to overall population is complicated by a second factor: the changing makeup of the country.
America was hardly a diverse nation when it was founded in the late 18th century, certainly not in the way we think of it today. According to the 1790 census, the population numbered 3.9 million people, 81 percent of them White. Enslaved Blacks counted as only three-fifths of a citizen and had no right to vote. Women could not vote. Indigenous people at the time lived as semi-independent nations.
Today, in a country of more than 330 million people, Whites, at 59 percent, remain in the majority. But the demographic composition of the country is changing, with non-White groups growing faster than the White population. By 2044, according to estimates, America will be a majority-minority nation.
And the most populous states, with few exceptions, also happen to be the most diverse. California is 40 percent Hispanic, 34 percent White, 16 percent Asian and 6.5 percent Black, according to the 2020 census. Wyoming is 83 percent White. This racial disparity between the most and least populous states has created a dramatic imbalance in terms of who is represented in the Senate.
White Americans are significantly overrepresented in the Senate today — by 14 percent, according to The Post’s analysis. An examination of the nation’s most and least populous states helps explain why: Whites make up 46 percent of the population of the five most populous states, but they account for 78 percent of the population of the five least populous states. Similarly, Hispanics make up 31 percent of the population in the five most populous states but 5 percent in the five least populous states.
The fact that the most populous states are the most diverse means that the voices of non-White voters are further diluted, adding another layer to the disadvantage of people living in them.
This imbalance has become especially pronounced since 1960, a period that overlaps with the civil rights era and laws that helped to enfranchise more Black voters after a century of post-Civil War discrimination.
The current demographic imbalances hark back to early compromises in the creation of the Constitution that protected the continuation of slavery. “Keeping those power structures in place maintains a particular racial hierarchy that’s existed in the country for a long time,” said Jennifer N. Victor, a political science professor at George Mason University.
A GOP edge
The third factor contributing to an unrepresentative Senate is that a political party can be in the majority yet represent only a minority of the population, a phenomenon known as minority rule. Because the founders created the Constitution in the absence of political parties, this is a problem they could not have anticipated. But it is front and center in the dialogue and debate about whether today’s federal government is as representative as it was intended to be.
Republicans have reaped the benefits of a skewed Senate. In the last quarter-century, when Republicans have had a majority in the Senate — as they have for about half that time — they have never represented a majority of the population, according to a Washington Post analysis.
What brought this about? Not so long ago, many states, regardless of population, sent divided delegations to the Senate. Today, in a polarized political environment, with voting for the Senate closely following state voting patterns for president, most Senate delegations are unified: two Republicans or two Democrats, with an occasional independent joining someone from one of the two main parties. In 1981, 24 states sent divided delegations to the Senate. In the current Senate, just five states have politically split delegations. In three of those states — Montana, West Virginia and Ohio — Trump won in 2020, and Republicans have an opportunity in 2024 to make their Senate delegations unified for the GOP. Should they succeed, Senate control will likely flip.
As this shift toward unified delegations has been happening, a partisan divide has emerged between the most and least populous states that has worked to the advantage of the Republican Party. Republicans have become the dominant party in many less-populated, rural states. Both North Dakota and South Dakota, for example, sent Democrats to the House and Senate a few decades ago. Today they are solid red states. More populated and more urban states — such as Illinois and California — have become more consistently Democratic in recent decades. This has allowed Republicans representing a minority of the population to gain majority control in the Senate.
Shaping outcomes
One area where this issue of minority rule has had a profound effect is on the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices — all Republican appointees — have been confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. That’s given the high court a 6-3 conservative majority, despite Democrats winning the popular vote for the presidency in seven of the past nine elections. Under this conservative majority, the court has ended the constitutional right to an abortion and eliminated affirmative action at colleges and universities.
The Supreme Court is not the only arena to feel the effects of minority rule. Under former president Donald Trump, nearly half of the people nominated for key positions in the government — officials with powers to shape such things as environmental rules and business regulations — were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. And one of Trump’s signature pieces of legislation, his 2017 tax cuts, passed with the votes of 51 senators representing just 44 percent of the country.
Policy ideas that enjoy broad support among the population, meanwhile, can languish or die in the Senate at the hands of senators representing a minority. One example is the lack of action on gun safety laws despite significant public support.
Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University, noted that because of the Senate’s partisan and racial distortions, proposals important to non-White voters can be especially susceptible to being blocked.
“The question is, are there particular issues that get caught in that vise that have direct implications for people of color?” Answering her own question, she cited immigration and voting rights; major initiatives on both fronts have at different times died in the Senate, though the Senate did pass immigration reform that later was blocked in the House.
Whenever there is talk of a broken Senate, critics point to the use and abuse of the filibuster as a prime example. The filibuster, which effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass most major legislation, is a tool that a minority in the Senate has long used to stall or stop legislation, even though it is not in the Constitution. Often employed by southern senators in an effort to block passage of civil rights legislation, use of the filibuster grew significantly over the past decade, affecting all kinds of legislation and contributing to a Senate that is less productive today.
Congress as a whole also is less productive in passing new laws in part because both the Senate and House are narrowly divided between the parties — an offshoot of a closely divided nation.
There is no simple solution to a Senate that today is less representative than it has ever been. Few believe there is any prospect of changing the two-senators-per-state arrangement. Eliminating or reforming the filibuster has made little progress in recent years. Most Democrats favor statehood for Puerto Rico and the District, presuming that would add four Democratic senators to offset the current Republican structural advantage. Bills to do that have passed through a Democratic-controlled House but have no path to 60 votes in the Senate.
The result is the Senate of 2023, in which an institution never designed to be fully representative has become even less so, leaving many more citizens with a diminished voice in the body’s decisions — and in the country’s future.
Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
About this story
Historic state-level population data is from the U.S. Census, while state-level population projections through 2040 are from the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. State-level race data is from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series USA.
The Post sourced information about historic Senate composition from the congress-legislators database. The Post’s count of senators in each year represents the composition of the Senate on Jan. 31 of that year, with two exceptions: Al Franken is counted in the 2009 Senate and Norris Cotton is counted in the 1975 Senate.
The Post used GovTrack data to track which senators voted for particular bills.
This story is part of Imperfect Union, a series examining the ways Americans feel unrepresented by a political system struggling with a collision of forces both old and new.
Reporting by Dan Balz. Data analysis by Clara Ence Morse. Editing by Griff Witte and Sarah Frostenson. Copy editing by Kathy Orton. Project editing by KC Schaper. Graphics by Nick Mourtoupalas. Graphic editing by Adrian Blanco Ramos. Design by Courtney Beesch. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Data editing by Anu Narayanswamy. Additional editing by Philip Rucker. Research by Monika Mathur.