From Michael Barone in The Washington Examiner,  Democrats will do better playing by the rules than denouncing the rules:

It’s suggested that the framers didn’t expect population to be so heavily concentrated in a few states. Actually, it was similarly concentrated in big states 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. And when the framers met in 1787, small states demanded equal Senate representation precisely from fear that the big states would dominate them.

Moreover, small states today aren’t uniformly Republican. Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii currently send two Democrats to the Senate. Maine, North Dakota, and Montana each send one. The 12 smallest states are represented by 13 Democratic senators and 11 Republicans.

Moreover, Article V of the Constitution provides that “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Changing that would require a new constitutional convention. That’s not going to happen.

It’s true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically clustered. For the Framers, that was a feature, not a bug. They feared domination by a concentrated bloc of voters with no broad support across the country.

A party which wants to win more elections might take note of that and look to broaden its support base, rather than plead for impossible constitutional changes and fiddle with fixes that might produce unanticipated negative consequences.

 

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