Population and Presidential Elections

In preparing a short lecture for lifelong learning on how statistical fluctuations or “records” naturally grow with time, I looked up those for popular votes in presidential elections.  This led to an old concern of many of how we are not a democracy in presidential elections, but a republic.  I chose to document the republic vs. democratic differences first.

From the 2010 census in Wikipedia, of the 308 million people in the US, the 9 most populous states contain more than half of the population.  The top states are California (37 million), Texas (25 million), New York (19 million), Florida (19 million), Illinois (13 million), Pennsylvania (13 million), and Ohio (12 million).  The 25 least populous states contain less than 1/6 of the total population.

There are 538 electoral votes:  438 for the number of representatives, and 100 for the number of senators.  California has more people than the 21 least populated states.  California gets 2 electoral votes from its 2 Senators.  The 21 least populated states get 42 electoral votes from their Senators.  Since their total population is about equal to California’s which gets 53 electoral votes from its representatives, the 21 states get roughly the same number of electoral votes from their House representatives (50 by my count).   Thuse the 21 least populated states with the same population as California get 92 electoral votes, compared to California’s 55 electoral votes.  Is it any wonder that California does not seem to get its fair share of Federal allotments.

Let’s look at the schedule of the primaries on the basis of the population of the states and what influence they may have in choosing the party candidates.  The Iowa caucus is Jan. 3.  Iowa has a population of 3.0 million, and is 30th in population.  Next is New Hampshire on Jan. 10, with a population of 1.3 million.  After that is South Carolina on Jan. 21 with a population of 4.6 million.  Finally, on Jan. 31, is Florida with 19 million.  It is clear that the candidates are spending most of their time in the six months before January on the first three states with a population of about 9 million, which have 3% of the US population.  It is of course not just the time spent in these states, but the many debates and policy speeches before these primaries that influence the candidates to select policies that will allow them to at least win one of these and obtain financing to continue their races.  The other three largest states have primaries on:  March 6 (Super Tuesday, Texas and 9 others); April 24 (New York, and 4 others); and June 5 (California, and 4 others).  (Data from “2012 Election Central”).

The other lack of democracy that arises in the States electoral vote system is that in any state, the majority party takes all of the electoral votes of a state, thus in effect disenfranchising the other voters from having their votes counted in a country-wide total.  In theory, half of the votes are not counted toward an electoral vote total.   There is a proposal that each state split its electoral votes in proportion to its popular vote.  If the small state, Republican or red states don’t do this, this just lowers any balance that the Democrats in the more urban large states might have (except Texas and Florida are Republican).  So unless this is mandated by a constitutional amendment for all states, it would not be good.

 

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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