Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has been working harder than most of his colleagues to get Republican candidate Herschel Walker elected to the Senate from Georgia. He’s stumped for Walker repeatedly; he’s been on Fox News more than once to boost Walker, including sitting for a “town hall” program hosted by Sean Hannity that amounted to little more than an extended campaign ad. And he was there Monday night, helping make a final push for voters to turn out.
Graham wants very much to see Republicans retake the majority in the chamber and clearly sees the swing Georgia seat as both instrumental to that effort and as a place where he can exert some influence. After all, he represents the state just across Georgia’s northeastern border.
Speaking on Monday night, Graham indirectly revealed that his embrace of Walker was not really about the candidate himself. It seems pretty clear that Graham would have been pushing just as hard for pretty much anyone who was going to appear on Georgia’s ballot in front of “(R).” After all, consider the warning he offered about the never-very-feasible idea that Democrats would push to grant statehood to two places that lack representation.
“Does anybody need D.C. and Puerto Rico to be a state?” he asked the crowd at the Walker rally, yielding a chorus of “No!” in response.
“That dilutes our power,” Graham concurred.
A frank assessment. Also an assessment worth parsing, given the unclear antecedent: dilute whose power?
You are certainly by now familiar with the fact that the Senate distributes power unevenly. There are about 600,000 people in Wyoming, a population that is granted 2 percent of the nation’s senators. There are about 40 million people in California, a population that is granted 2 percent of the nation’s senators. California is granted more than 50 voting seats in the House, more than 12 percent of the total votes in that chamber. Wyoming gets one-fifth of 1 percent of House votes. But in the Senate? They’re even.
This advantages Republicans. There are a lot of rural states that have two senators, and rural states tend to vote more heavily Republican. So that 2 percent of the Senate from Wyoming is Republican and the 2 percent of the Senate from California Democratic. Wyoming’s one-fifth of 1 percent of the House is Republican, too; California’s 12 percent is more than 80 percent Democratic.
Defenders of the system, also generally Republicans, insist that this is necessary to protect the cohesiveness of the nation. If Wyoming didn’t have the robust say in Congress granted by its two Senate seats, the argument goes, why would it choose to remain in the United States just to be governed by coastal Democrats?
Of course, this argument depends largely on arbitrary decisions about where state lines were drawn. Do you know why the Dakotas provide four Republicans to the Senate? Because the region was split into two separate states upon admission to the U.S. to have twice as many senators. If we split California into four states, three of which were heavily Democratic, it’s safe to assume that the response would not be: Good, that gives the Republican-voting “state” more of a say in national politics.
That’s the natural way to read Graham’s comments, of course: Adding D.C. and Puerto Rico means adding new states that he predicts would simply send more Democrats to the Senate. Sure, D.C. is more populous than Vermont or Wyoming, but giving D.C. statehood adds Democrats and therefore dilutes Republican power. Republican power that depends on things like fragmenting the Dakotas in the first pace.
Puerto Rico, incidentally, is more populous than 20 states. It’s got more residents than Nevada or Arkansas or Iowa. But it has no say at all in voting for president or in the Senate. It just has to be governed by coastal Democrats … and interior-state Republicans.
Let’s assume for the moment that Graham’s assumption is right and that making D.C. and Puerto Rico states would simply give Democrats four more senators. Right now, with a 50-50 Senate, 186 million Americans are represented by Democrats and 145 million by Republicans (divvying up a state’s population between the two parties where the Senate representation is split). That’s 3.7 million people represented by each Democratic senator and 2.9 million per Republican. If there were suddenly 54 Democrats and we add in the unrepresented populations of D.C. and Puerto Rico to the total, each Democratic senator now represents 3.5 million people — still more than 20 percent more than the number represented by each Republican.
Even setting that aside, the assumption isn’t fair. Like D.C., Puerto Rico has nonvoting representation in the House. The island’s current resident commissioner (as the seat is called) is Jenniffer González — an official aligned with the Republican Party. A decade ago, the island’s governor was affiliated with the GOP. The idea that both of Puerto Rico’s senators would be Republicans is hard to defend.
It’s impossible not to point out that both D.C. and Puerto Rico are heavily non-White. D.C. has a lower percentage of non-Hispanic Whites than all but three states; Puerto Rico’s percentage is lower than all 50 states and D.C. But again, remember that Puerto Rico has more residents than a number of those other states.
We can put a finer point on this. Graham and the crowd at that Walker rally believe that neither D.C. nor Puerto Rico should have representation in the Senate, and Graham worries — despite Puerto Rico’s Republican-friendly voting history — that “their” power would be diluted were those territories to be made states. Power that is already weighted heavily to the GOP’s advantage, ostensibly because it’s necessary to retain a cohesive nation.
You may draw your own conclusions about Graham’s comments.