Does the 109th Congress Represent America?

Joseph Rozier
November 20, 2004 (Updated January 12, 2005)

See the related spreadsheet, which contains the complete makeup of the 109th Congress.

Introduction

[NOTE: The original November 20th version of this included 3 undecided races; those races have now been decided and the following has been updated accordingly.]

Since the election, I've been thinking about how much of the result can be attributed to Americans not agreeing with Democratic positions, and how much can be attributed to other factors. These other factors are things like the politics of personality (how many people made their decision on who was more likeable, not who they agreed with more?), emotional manipulation (like Dick Cheney's warnings that a Kerry victory would lead to a terrorist attack), a flawed system of representation, and many other things that Republicans (and many Democrats to differing degrees) would think of as excuses.

Most recently, I've been thinking a little bit about how much Republican gains in Congress might reflect over-representation due to the way House seats are apportioned--a structural issue. I did some rudimentary analysis, and it turns out that some issues with apportionment that I thought might account for Republican over-representation does nothing of the sort.

A Hypothesis That the House Over-Represents Republicans

Theoretically, the House of Representatives should be the half of Congress that more closely represents the actual popular sentiment because each Representative is chosen by a district of roughly equal size. If this is the case, the percentage of seats held by a party in the House should roughly be the same as the percentage of people who support that party. (There are some problems with this assumption, which will be described below; but in general this is how the House is supposed to work.)

There are 232 Republicans, 202 Democrats, and 1 Independent in the 109th Congress (according to CNN on November 20, 2004 and Juan Cabanela's site on January 12, 2005). Given that, Republicans currently have 53.33% of seats, and Democrats currently have 46.44% of the seats.

My hypothesis was that these percentages did not match the number of people who are actually represented by each party in Congress though. This discrepancy could be caused by the fact that Congressional districts do not actually have an equal population. Congressional districts are supposed to be roughly equal in size, but because of the fixed number of seats (435) having to be divided into 50 states, this doesn't always happen. Even within a state, it is unlikely that a district will have exactly the same number of people.

In July 2003, there were 290,245,393 people in the 50 states. (I left out DC because it doesn't have a vote in Congress.) So, each of the 435 congressional districts should have around 667,000 people in it. Because the 435 cannot be distributed exactly evenly, though, the average population in a Congressional district in each state varies. Wyoming, for example, only had 501,242 people for their 1 representative. Because each congressional district receives an equal vote in the House, each person in a less-populated district receives a bigger say in the government.

It can help to think of extremes. Imagine a state that has a single person. That state would be guaranteed at least one Congressional district; in this case, the size of the Congressional district is one person. Now, imagine another perfectly average Congressional district that has 667,000 people. Both Congressional districts send a representative that gets 1 vote in the House. So, in one case, 1 House vote is given to 1 person; in the other case, 1 House vote is given to 667,000 people to share.

My hypothesis was that the small advantages that small states received (such as Wyoming) would add up. Since most small states lean Republican, I assumed that this would mean Republicans were over-represented in Congress.

A Hypothesis Proved Wrong

The Wyoming example is proof by anecdote, and that won't work. One could just as easily look at Delaware. The poor people of Delaware have only 1 (Republican) Representative representing 817,491 people--a lot more than the average Representative.

So, I did a bit of analysis. I created a spreadsheet that has the average population for each Congressional district in each state. I then multiplied the average population for a district by the number of districts in each state represented by each political party. This allowed me to get an idea of how many people in each state is represented by Republicans, and how many are represented by Democrats.

If you total this up for all states, you can determine an approximation of the number of Americans represented by Republicans in Congress, and the number of Americans represented by Democrats in Congress.

It turns out that Republicans represent 53.46% of the American population, and Democrats represent 46.33% of the population. This pretty closely matches the percentages of seats that each party holds (53.33% for Republicans, 46.44% for Democrats).

An Analysis of the Analysis, And Future Work

It turns out my base assumptions were just plain wrong. Small states can lead to over-representation (as in Wyoming), but can also lead to significant under-representation. Montana, for example, has over 917,000 people in a single Congressional district.

More importantly, the effect of apportionment disparities is not limited to small states. Oregon, for example, has 5 representatives with the average district being over 710,000 people--an under-representation. Iowa has 5 representatives also, with the average district being just under 590,000 people--an over-representation.

When you sort based on average Congressional district size, no obvious Republican over-representation or under-representation emerges. The top 10 over-represented states have an almost equal number of red and blue states, as do the top 10 under-represented states.

Let me be the first to say my analysis is flawed and incomplete. A better analysis would be to find the actual population of each congressional district (instead of just an average size for each congressional district in a state). This isn't likely to make that much of a difference, though, and certainly wouldn't change the fact that my original assumption that Republicans were over-represented was wrong.

The analysis is also flawed because it doesn't take into account how many people represented by a particular party voted for that party. For example, if all of the Republicans won in very close elections, and all of the Democrats won in landslides, then one could argue that Democrats were severely unrepresented. That's a big hypothetical, and I doubt that any under-representation on either side is that significant. I don't have the data or expertise to find out, but I would be curious to see the analysis if anyone does.

These additional analyses would address the issue of Congressional districting (wherein each state determines the borders of its own districts). This is different than my analysis, which is affected more by apportionment (wherein the 435 available seats are divided among the 50 states).

(It was surprisingly difficult to find the number of Representatives from each state in the 109th Congress broken down by party. I went through the results on CNN for each state and counted them up myself. Hopefully this work will be useful to someone else interested in doing some analysis related to the makeup of the congressional delegations from each state.)

A Bit About the Senate

Before I thought about the apportionment problem that turned out to be wrong, I had done some thinking about the Senate. It was surprising, given the number of Red States, that the Senate was not even more Republican than it is. There were 31 states that went for Bush, so if they were "pure Red" and the other 19 were "pure Blue", then the Senate makeup would be 62 Republicans vs. 38 Democrats--the Republicans would have a filibuster-proof majority. Instead, the Senate is 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 1 Independent. (Since the Senate has 100 members, those numbers can also be used as percentages.)

A senate with 62 Republicans would be significantly inconsistent with the sentiment of the population, which according to the last vote was just slightly more than half Republican. But this Senate make-up wouldn't be out of the realm of expectation, since the Senate was intended to amplify the desires of the small (now predominantly Republican) states.