Illustration by Tom Bachtell

October is to political prognosticators what February is to florists and April is to accountants; namely, the time when a profession that’s peripheral to our daily concerns momentarily becomes the center of our attention. This season’s forecasting for the midterm elections is largely occupied with the partisan balance of the Senate. (The Times’ Upshot column has it seventy-one per cent likely that the Republicans will gain control. FiveThirtyEight puts the G.O.P.’s odds at sixty-one per cent.) The uncertainty hinges on about ten races that are too close to call, despite the finely calibrated statistical divination of experts. There is, however, one outcome that requires no sophisticated simulations to predict: the Senate will not look like the country. There are currently eighty male senators. Women, who make up fifty-one per cent of the population, hold just twenty per cent of Senate seats. The Senate, notoriously, is not proportional in its representation, but the highest number of seats that women can hope to hold next year will still be fewer than thirty. Currently, three states have two female senators, but thirty-three states are represented by two men.

This kind of imbalance is not limited to the upper chamber of the legislative branch. According to “Who Leads Us,” a report issued earlier this month by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an offshoot of the Women Donors Network, which works to increase the number of female and minority elected officials, the makeup of American politics is still overwhelmingly dissimilar to the demographics of the country. Discussions of the tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, have focussed on the asymmetry between demographics and political leadership there, but, as the report makes clear, this is an issue of degree, not of kind. Ferguson’s city council doesn’t reflect its electorate, but it does resemble American politics. Whites, who constitute sixty-three per cent of the population, occupy ninety per cent of federal, state, and county-wide elected offices. Men compose forty-nine per cent of the populace but seventy-one per cent of officeholders. New York City is one of the most racially diverse cities in the nation, but whites, who make up thirty-three per cent of the population, hold fifty-one per cent of the seats on the city council. The State Legislature ranks forty-second in gender parity, behind far less liberal states—among them Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi—and forty-fourth in proportionate representation of minorities.

There is something distasteful about the idea of measuring politics in terms of percentages. It carries the whiff of a quota system and suggests that one’s interests can be adequately represented only by a kind of political color coördination. Yet nearly a century after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, and forty-nine years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it remains true that the groups that travelled the most difficult route to enfranchisement are the most underrepresented at every level of government. This situation is at least mildly confounding. A Gallup poll conducted in July found that sixty-three per cent of respondents believed that we would be better off with more women in elected office. (The partisan divide on the question was noteworthy: seventy-five per cent of Democrats agreed with the sentiment; forty-six per cent of Republicans did.)

The fact that underrepresented groups can vote, and do so in substantial numbers (black women had the highest voter turnout of any segment in the country in 2008 and 2012), begs a question: Why aren’t there more such candidates? “Think of politics as a career ladder,” Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at Binghamton University, who studies electoral representation, says. “You start out by running for school board or city council. From there, you go to state representative or state senator, and that positions you to run for Congress.” But nearly fifty per cent of small cities and forty-four per cent of medium-sized ones rely on at-large municipal elections, in which minority voters are dispersed among the general electorate—not counted as part of a particular ward or district, where their appeal would be more concentrated. This means that minority candidates have to win over more white voters, who still tend to favor white candidates. As a result, McDonald says, “Many minority candidates have a harder time getting onto the bottom rung of the ladder.”

And that doesn’t take into account the dynamics that influence whether someone chooses to run in the first place. “There are a lot of decisions that are made before you even see someone’s name on a ballot,” Brenda Choresi Carter, the director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, says. Cracking the network of donors, influential allies, supportive labor unions, and pacs is daunting to any political aspirant. It is far more so to groups that are already underrepresented. Carter adds that when the parties recruit candidates at the local level they “pull from within their own network. If those networks are male-dominated or white, they essentially end up with people who kind of look like them.” For women, that skew is often compounded by issues of childcare and the work-life balance.

Moreover, voters don’t necessarily form neat blocs, according to their race or gender. Last year, when Christine Quinn, then the Speaker of the City Council, ran for mayor of New York, she won the support of just sixteen per cent of female voters in the primary. Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland, served two terms as mayor of Baltimore, beating a crowded field of black candidates in an electorate that, when he first ran, in 1999, was sixty-three per cent black. In 2006, Lynn Swann, Ken Blackwell, and Michael Steele—three black Republicans—ran for statewide office in, respectively, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland, but none of them garnered more than a quarter of the black vote. In each instance, black voters preferred white Democratic candidates to black Republican ones.

At the same time, redistricting has created increasingly safe districts that are also increasingly polarized by race. Eighty-nine per cent of House Republicans are white men; only forty-seven per cent of House Democrats are. The creation of a comparatively small number of majority-minority districts has simultaneously created many more districts that are far whiter than the country is as a whole. As David Wasserman, of FiveThirtyEight, has pointed out, the average Republican House district is now three-quarters white. There are no black Republicans in the House.

Conversations about the shifting demographics of the country have presumed that these changes will be reflected in our politics. We need look no further than Congress to recognize that there may be strength in numbers, but numbers alone do not automatically translate into strength. ♦