Big State, Small State

RUTLAND, Vt. — In the four years after the financial crisis struck, a great wave of federal stimulus money washed over Rutland County. It helped pay for bridges, roads, preschool programs, a community health center, buses and fire trucks, water mains and tanks, even a project to make sure fish could still swim down the river while a bridge was being rebuilt.

Just down Route 4, at the New York border, the landscape abruptly turns from spiffy to scruffy. Washington County, N.Y., which is home to about 60,000 people — just as Rutland is — saw only a quarter as much money.

“We didn’t receive a lot,” said Peter Aust, the president of the local chamber of commerce on the New York side. “We never saw any of the positive impact of the stimulus funds.”

Vermont’s 625,000 residents have two United States senators, and so do New York’s 19 million. That means that a Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker just over the state line — the biggest inequality between two adjacent states. The nation’s largest gap, between Wyoming and California, is more than double that.

The difference in the fortunes of Rutland and Washington Counties reflects the growing disparity in their citizens’ voting power, and it is not an anomaly. The Constitution has always given residents of states with small populations a lift, but the size and importance of the gap has grown markedly in recent decades, in ways the framers probably never anticipated. It affects the political dynamic of issues as varied as gun control, immigration and campaign finance.

In response, lawmakers, lawyers and watchdog groups have begun pushing for change. A lawsuit to curb the small-state advantage in the Senate’s rules is moving through the courts. The Senate has already made modest changes to rules concerning the filibuster, which has particularly benefited senators from small states. And eight states and the District of Columbia have endorsed a proposal to reduce the chances that the small-state advantage in the Electoral College will allow a loser of the popular vote to win the presidency.

To be sure, some scholars and members of Congress view the small-state advantage as a vital part of the constitutional structure and say the growth of that advantage is no cause for worry. Others say it is an authentic but insoluble problem.

What is certain is that the power of the smaller states is large and growing. Political scientists call it a striking exception to the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Indeed, they say, the Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Behind the growth of the advantage is an increase in population gap between large and small states, with large states adding many more people than small ones in the last half-century. There is a widening demographic split, too, with the larger states becoming more urban and liberal, and the smaller ones remaining rural and conservative, which lends a new significance to the disparity in their political power.

The threat of the filibuster in the Senate, which has become far more common than in past decades, plays a role, too. Research by two political scientists, Lauren C. Bell and L. Marvin Overby, has found that small-state senators, often in leadership positions, have amplified their power by using the filibuster more often than their large-state counterparts.

Beyond influencing government spending, these shifts generally benefit conservative causes and hurt liberal ones. When small states block or shape legislation backed by senators representing a majority of Americans, most of the senators on the winning side tend to be Republicans, because Republicans disproportionately live in small states and Democrats, especially African-Americans and Latinos, are more likely to live in large states like California, New York, Florida and Illinois. Among the nation’s five smallest states, only Vermont tilts liberal, while Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas have each voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968.

Recent bills to overhaul the immigration system and increase disclosure of campaign spending have won the support of senators representing a majority of the population but have not yet passed. A sweeping climate bill, meant to raise the cost of carbon emissions, passed the House, where seats are allocated by population, but not the Senate.

Each of those bills is a major Democratic Party priority. Throughout his second term, President Obama is likely to be lining up with a majority of large-state Congress members on his biggest goals and against a majority of small-state lawmakers.

It is easiest to measure the small-state advantage in dollars. Over the past few years, as the federal government has spent hundreds of billions to respond to the financial crisis, it has done much more to assist the residents of small states than large ones. The top five per capita recipients of federal stimulus grants were states so small that they have only a single House member.

“From highway bills to homeland security,” said Sarah A. Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, “small states make out like bandits.”

Here in Rutland, the federal government has spent $2,500 per person since early 2009, compared with $600 per person across the state border in Washington County.

As the money started arriving, Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent, took credit for having delivered a “hefty share of the national funding.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, vowed to fight for her state’s “fair share.”

As a matter of constitutional design, small states have punched above their weight politically for as long as the United States has existed. The founding of the country depended in part on the Great Compromise, which created a legislative chamber — the Senate — in which every state had the same political voice, regardless of population. The advantage small states enjoy in the Senate is echoed in the Electoral College, where each state is allocated votes not only for its House members (reflecting the state’s population) but also for its senators (a two-vote bonus).

No one expects the small-state advantage to disappear, given its constitutional roots. But its growing importance has caused some large-state policy makers and advocates for giving all citizens an equal voice in democracy to begin exploring ways to counteract it. Those pushing for change tend to be Democrats.

One plan, enacted into law by eight states and the District of Columbia, would effectively cancel the small states’ Electoral College edge. The nine jurisdictions have pledged to allocate their 132 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — if they can persuade states with 138 more votes to make the same commitment. (That would represent the bare majority of the 538 electoral votes needed for a presidential candidate to prevail.)

The states that have agreed to the arrangement range in size from Vermont to California, and they are dominated by Democrats. But support for changing the Electoral College cuts across party lines. In a recent Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 66 percent of Democrats said they favored abolishing the system and awarding the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.

In 2000, had electoral votes been allocated by population, without the two-vote bonuses, Al Gore would have prevailed over George W. Bush. Alexander Keyssar, a historian of democracy at Harvard, said he would not be surprised if another Republican candidate won the presidency while losing the popular vote in coming decades, given the structure of the Electoral College.

Critics of the outsize power of small states have also turned to the courts. In December, four House members and the advocacy group Common Cause filed an appeal in a lawsuit challenging the Senate’s filibuster rule on the ground that it “upsets the balance in the Great Compromise” that created the Senate.

The filibuster “has significantly increased the underrepresentation of people living in the most populous states,” the suit said. But for the rule, it said, the Dream Act, which would have given some immigrants who arrived illegally as children a path to legalization, and the Disclose Act, requiring greater reporting of political spending, would be law.

A federal judge in Washington dismissed the suit, saying he was “powerless to address” what he acknowledged was an “important and controversial issue.” The judge instead sided with lawyers for the Senate, who said that the challengers lacked standing to sue and that the courts lacked power to rule on the internal workings of another branch of the government.

However these individual efforts fare, the basic disparity between large and small states is wired into the constitutional framework. Some scholars say that this is as it should be and that the advantages enjoyed by small states are necessary to prevent them from becoming a voiceless minority.

“Without it, wealth and power would tend to flow to the prosperous coasts and cities and away from less-populated rural areas,” said Stephen Macedo, a political scientist at Princeton.

Gary L. Gregg II, a political scientist who holds the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the University of Louisville, similarly argued that urban areas already have enough power, as the home of most major government agencies, news media organizations, companies and universities. “A simple, direct democracy will centralize all power,” he wrote recently, “in urban areas to the detriment of the rest of the nation.”

Others say the country needs to make changes to preserve its democratic vitality. They have called for an overhaul of the Constitution, as far-fetched an idea as that may be.

“The Senate constitutes a threat to the vitality of the American political system in the 21st century,” said Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, “and it warrants a constitutional convention to rectify it.”

Frances E. Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said the problem was as real as the solution elusive, adding that she and other scholars have tried without success to find a contemporary reason to exempt the Senate from the usual rules of granting citizens an equal voice in their government. “I can’t think of any way to justify it based on democratic principles,” Professor Lee said.