Why even make this?
Everywhere else on this site, the numbers speak for themselves. This page is different: it’s where we say what we think they add up to. No bill’s own description carries any of this, and none of it factors into how a single figure gets computed.
The Senate gives every state, including tiny states, two votes.
Wyoming’s two senators speak for 447,402 adult residents. California’s two speak for 30,513,773.
If a voter moves from California to Wyoming, her Senate vote becomes 68 times more influential.
The House is not allowed to add new seats since a 1929 law, but our population has tripled.
Giant districts do not always reflect their populations.
The cap is an ordinary law, not the Constitution. Congress could change it tomorrow.
The House
Seats in the House were meant to track population, but the House has been capped at 435 members since 1929, while the country nearly tripled in size. That cap is not in the Constitution. It is an ordinary law, and Congress could change it tomorrow. If it did, districts would be closer to one another in population and the chamber would track the country more honestly than it does now.
Why this site exists
Everything above is a structural argument about how the Senate is built. Here is what that structure has actually been producing, measured every year since 2005. Only three times has a majority of Senate bill votes been won by a side representing a minority of the country’s adults: 2017, and then 2025 and 2026, back to back for the first time. 68% of Senate bill votes in 2025 were won this way, the highest share in the 22-year record, against a previous high of 62% in 2017. The average winning side still edges past half the country most years, which is precisely why the vote-by-vote share matters more than the average: a bare 51% majority looks fine on a chart until you notice how often it’s the actual result, not the exception.
The House line below is not a second finding. It’s the control. Districts are drawn to track population, so if representation had simply gotten worse everywhere (a more polarized Congress, a country splitting into narrower coalitions) the House would show the same drift the Senate does. It doesn’t. The House stays in a tight band for the whole 22 years on record while the Senate falls off a cliff. That gap is the evidence that this is a story about the Senate’s map, not about American politics getting closer or more contentious in general.
Show these figures as a table
| Year | House average | House votes under half | Senate average | Senate votes under half |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | 72.0% | 3% | 79.2% | 6% |
| 2006 | 69.1% | 6% | 74.0% | 22% |
| 2007 | 67.5% | 20% | 69.7% | 23% |
| 2008 | 69.9% | 24% | 69.7% | 18% |
| 2009 | 74.1% | 6% | 72.2% | 2% |
| 2010 | 75.8% | 12% | 63.9% | 17% |
| 2011 | 63.4% | 2% | 71.0% | 17% |
| 2012 | 61.5% | 8% | 70.2% | 19% |
| 2013 | 63.6% | 5% | 68.5% | 10% |
| 2014 | 62.1% | 7% | 67.5% | 20% |
| 2015 | 63.4% | 2% | 64.6% | 31% |
| 2016 | 63.7% | 4% | 73.3% | 11% |
| 2017 | 65.9% | 2% | 57.6% | 62% |
| 2018 | 69.0% | 4% | 75.8% | 11% |
| 2019 | 66.2% | 6% | 65.5% | 29% |
| 2020 | 64.1% | 10% | 64.6% | 34% |
| 2021 | 69.1% | 27% | 66.4% | 12% |
| 2022 | 71.4% | 30% | 64.0% | 20% |
| 2023 | 65.2% | 16% | 63.2% | 30% |
| 2024 | 65.5% | 39% | 66.5% | 12% |
| 2025 | 62.9% | 21% | 51.0% | 68% |
| 2026 | 60.8% | 34% | 53.8% | 63% |
This has nothing to do with how anyone actually voted. It’s a property of the seat map alone: given the current Congress, here is the smallest and largest share of the country a bare majority could represent in each chamber.
119th Congress. A bare Senate majority (51 of 100 seats, the smallest states first) could in principle represent as little as 16.7% of the country. The House, capped at 435 seats since 1929, has a narrower range: its smallest possible majority still needs 47.7% of the country behind it.
The Senate
Two senators per state means 30.5 million adult Californians hold the same voting share as 447,000 adult Wyomingites. A voter who moves from San Diego to Cheyenne becomes 68 times more influential in the Senate without changing a single opinion. The math systematically favors smaller rural states, which today lean Republican, and that undercuts the legislature’s claim to speak for the country.