Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.1 It is not difficult to imagine an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned, and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter ID requirements, and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance. That would not, in the long term, prove a stable system.

The threat to the United States of America has always been disunity. At the time of its founding, the strongest and most politically important identities were state identities, and the central tension was between those who feared the (white, male) voting public and those who trusted it, so we built a system meant to calm those divisions. We balanced big and small states in the Senate. We balanced democratic and elite rule by handing the House to the voters, the Senate to state legislatures (popular elections came to the US Senate only with the 1913 ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment), and the White House, through the peculiar institution of the electoral college, to both.