Reapportioning the People's House

When the Reapportionment Act, which capped the number of Congressional seats at 435 members was passed in 1929, each member of Congress represented a measly 210,328 people. Nowadays, nearly a century later, that number has more than tripled to a staggering 761,169 people per Congressional district on average. This dramatic increase in population size per district has led to disastrous consequences for representation in Congress.

The most critical over the past couple of decades has been gerrymandering. Larger district sizes incentivize gerrymandering because, with more population to work with, it is much easier to crack blue city centers and tie them to large red rural and exurban areas. This issue can be seen in some of the most egregiously gerrymandered states for Republicans in places like Texas, Florida, and Tennessee, where large urban metros are being sliced apart and placed with heavily Republican rural areas to dilute their power. With smaller district sizes, though, this task would be much trickier, and, while theoretically possible, would make gerrymandered maps much more vulnerable to legal attacks since the district shapes would become even more hideous and squiggly. When paired with a federal law mandating independent redistricting commissions, it could help end the critical issue of gerrymandering for good.

Furthermore, small district sizes allow for better and stronger representation for communities of color. Current districting standards mandate the creation of majority-minority districts in certain situations, but this has its downsides. Smaller districts could be the solution. Rather than being forced into geographically similar yet demographically different communities surrounding them, people from these historically underrepresented communities will have an opportunity to have their voices be heard. Having more diverse perspectives in Congress can ensure that issues that communities of color often disproportionately face, such as environmental racism and access to education, do not get overshadowed and ignored.

Most significantly, though, having smaller district sizes will allow people to connect with their Congressional representative more. Obscenely large population sizes per Congressional district favor television ads and mailers, costlier forms of campaigning that give special interest and dark money groups greater power to influence elections, disfavoring grassroots campaigning because of the difficulty in reaching people. Thus, it becomes very difficult for average people to have an opportunity to actually meet their representative, which can lead to people getting disillusioned with the government since they lack a personal connection to the person who is supposed to be fighting for them. By making district sizes smaller, it’ll make it easier for local politicians and activists to run for Congress, which could help bridge the gap between the local community and its federal representation. Furthermore, even if the amount of money being funneled into campaigns remained identical to current levels, significantly less money would be devoted to each race.

Because smaller district sizes have a variety of benefits, from reducing the effects of gerrymandering to allowing for stronger community and grassroots campaigning, there have been a variety of ideas on the best way to uncap the House of Representatives to expand the number of seats. I will be focusing on the three of the most prominent proposals: the Wyoming Rule, the Fixed Number Rule, and the Cube Root Rule.

The premise behind the Wyoming Rule is simple. The population per Congressional district should be as close as possible to the smallest state’s population. In modern times, this would be Wyoming, with a population of around 580,000 individuals, representing a drastic 180,000 loss in population per Congressional district or around approximately a 24% cut in district size.

This would cause the number of Congressional districts to swell to 573 districts and would reduce the current population disparity between the largest and smallest Congressional districts by around 25%. Currently, Delaware’s at-large Congressional district contains approximately 970,000 residents, with over 430,000 more people than that of Montana’s Congressional districts, which each contain around 540,000 people. With the Wyoming Rule applied, there would be a smaller 340,000 population difference between the most overrepresented state, South Dakota, and most underrepresented, North Dakota, a significant decrease.

More than just that, the biggest advantage that the Wyoming Rule has over other proposals is that it's an easily understandable piece of legislation, since it's common knowledge that Wyoming is the least populous state in the country and much more messageable to voters. The number chosen for the population per Congressional district is not arbitrary or abstract, but incredibly simple. 

However, the Wyoming Rule does have severe flaws that could hamper its application. For one, it has the possibility to cause wild fluctuations in the number of Congressional districts. If the Wyoming Rule were applied in 1930, when Nevada was the smallest state by population, there would be a whopping 1,343 Congressional districts. Two decades later, that number would drop by around 25% down to 936 districts, cutting over 400 districts in just the span of 20 years. For reference, that’s the equivalent of losing nearly a full House in two years.

Although supporters of the proposal can point to the fact that for the past four decades, Wyoming’s population relative to the country has remained relatively stable, and since 1980, the number of Congressional districts would fluctuate around the mid-500s. Still, it does raise the merits of arbitrarily tying the number of Congressional districts to a certain state, especially since seemingly small population changes can have major reverberating effects for the entire country.

This concern is why proponents of expanding the House have embraced a different rule to determine the population per Congressional district: the Cube Root Rule. The idea is only slightly more complex than the Wyoming Rule. Essentially, the cube root of the country’s population is taken, and that number would represent the number of Congressional districts. According to the most recent census data, the number of districts should the Cube Root Rule be applied would be 693, a 258 seat increase.

Much like the Wyoming Rule, the Cube Root Rule has drastically lowered the average number of people per Congressional district down to 475,000, around a 38% decrease in average district size. Furthermore, there is only a 250,000 population size difference between the most overrepresented state, Alaska with around 370,000 residents, and the most underrepresented state, Vermont with around 620,000 residents, an overall improvement over the Wyoming Rule’s 340,000 population difference.

Beyond having many of the advantages of the Wyoming Rule, using the Cube Root Rule means that there will not be peaks and dips in the number of Congressional districts based on the whims of a small state’s growth or loss. In fact, using the Cube Root Rule means that as long as the country’s population is growing, the number of Congressional districts would grow, allowing for a steady increase in seats to accommodate increasing numbers of people. 

Although policy-wise, the Cube Root Rule trumps the Wyoming Rule in virtually all aspects, its biggest flaw is that it’s not a particularly well-known policy and can prove difficult to market and message to voters. Although these concerns have not been proven during elections, utilizing a math concept such as the cube root would prove to be more ambiguous to voters over utilizing a state as a baseline, as it is with the Wyoming Rule. When crafting new policy, political actionability is sometimes even more important than effectiveness. 

The Cube Root and the Wyoming Rule share one central flaw: despite temporarily dropping the number of people per representative for the moment, eventually, as the country continues growing, the population size per district will swell back up to its former state. Ultimately, according to some, the Wyoming and Cube Root proposals do not go far enough in ensuring fair representation for the people, which is why some have proposed a Fixed Number Rule.

Essentially, it acts as an inverse to the current system, where rather than capping the number of seats and expanding population per seat, it caps population per Congressional district to a fixed number, say 100,000 or 200,000 people, and utilizes that to determine seat count. For instance, with 100,000 people per district, there would be 3,314 Congressional districts nationwide, and even a more modest 200,000 people per Congressional district would still lead to 1,657 districts, nearly quadrupling the size of the current House.

Having the House of Representatives dramatically increase has some major upsides in promoting fairer elections. For one, having 100,000 people per district makes gerrymandering even more difficult than the Wyoming or Cube Root Rule since it becomes nearly impossible to crack apart large metro areas to dilute the urban, Democratic vote in red states such as Texas, Florida, and Utah. Furthemore, these micro districts can lead to a resurgence of a more grassroots organizing strategy since candidates will have greater opportunities to interact with their constituents.

Yet, despite the upsides to drastically expanding the House, there are some major drawbacks that have made many hesitant to embrace the Fixed Number Rule. The biggest issue is that having 3,314 Congresspeople would make governing extremely difficult since it’d be hard for party leaders to organize their members and whip votes for certain policy proposals, which could lead to chaos and general dysfunction. At the bare minimum, we would have to dramatically change how our entire lower congressional house functions. 

There’s also the issue of election spending. Currently, there are around 30 to 40 competitive elections for this midterm, but with much smaller districts, especially ones that dilute the impact of gerrymandering, there could be over a thousand competitive elections per cycle. Without being paired with campaign finance reform, this would make it particularly difficult for candidates to be able to raise enough money to hire campaign staff and could lead to an influx of wealthier candidates, who would be able to self-fund their campaigns, winning out.

While increasing the cap to, say, 200,000 or 300,000 members per district could alleviate this issue of having a Congress that’s simply far too large, much like how both the Wyoming and Cube Root Rule will eventually lead to overpopulated districts over time, a larger cap will only delay the future swell of members going into the future.

Although each proposal has advantages and disadvantages, ultimately, any one of these, if implemented, would be far better than our current status quo. As gerrymandering has stripped power away from people, especially communities of color, while  anti-democratic mobilize amidst a rise in cynicism about politics, uncapping the House of Representatives would be a crucial first step in promoting democracy. Although these proposals will radically change our elections, some more than others, it is of the utmost importance that we take this bold step to ensure that Congress truly represents the people.