In the past, rural states worked to the Democrats’ advantage; the party’s near-constant majorities in the upper chamber from the 1930s to the 1990s were built largely on the back of its successes in large, rural states. And Senate disproportionality has been worse in the past than it is today. In 1900, the largest state was 171 times the size of the smallest. Today, California is 68 times the size of Wyoming. With the exception of the 1980 census, the gap has not been this low since the 1850s. However, the percentage of the population required to elect a Senate majority—the people of the smallest 26 states, in effect—has never been smaller, and is now down to just 17 percent of Americans.

Malapportionment is unconstitutional in the United States, says the University of Missouri political scientist Peverill Squire, except when it applies to the Senate, and that creates a power imbalance that belies the psephological maxim: Land doesn’t vote. Except, of course, when it does.

The problem is still a substantial one, particularly for those who emphasize the principle of one person, one vote. The problem with the idea rests in the Constitution. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, a noted proponent of electoral reform who has introduced a bill in Congress to radically alter the way the House is elected, summed up the issue: “We’re not America; we’re the United States of America.” The Senate’s equal representation, in this view, mirrors that of the United Nations, where Monaco and China each get one vote. Since each state is constitutionally viewed as co-equal and sovereign, it cannot be subjugated to the will of another. But whether that reality has continued relevance is debatable.

On June 11, 1787, Roger Sherman rose in a Philadelphia room filled with other landowning men and recommended a bicameral legislature for America, with one house apportioned by population and the other apportioned equally among the states. This deal—the Connecticut Compromise, as it would later be known—has organized American legislative governance for nearly two and a half centuries. Sherman’s original proposal was not, of course, designed to boost popular representation. The will of the people, itself a narrower concept at a time when voting was restricted to the white and male, would be expressed in the House of Representatives. The Senate would express the interests of the states, conceived of as sovereign entities unto themselves rather than as a wholly cohesive nation. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the spring of 1913, senators were elected by the legislature of their respective state.

Those who want to eliminate the Senate wholesale argue that the ship has sailed on states as sovereign entities. The federalism, they contend, fundamentally undermines basic democratic due process and the voting rights of actual people. “The principle of democratic governance is one person, one vote, and the Senate is the opposite of that,” says Sean Monahan, a former member of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America. Daniel Lazare, a journalist who specializes in American politics and has written three books on constitutional issues, argued in Jacobin in 2014 that the Senate is “one of the most cockeyed systems of minority rule in history, one that allows tiny coteries to hold the entire country ransom until their demands are met.”