Liberal YouTubers

In It to Win It

(12,516 posts) Thu Feb 5, 2026, 11:01 PM 10 hrs ago

The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it.

For more than a century, the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats; in that same period, the US population has tripled. This means that today, the average representative is responsible for more than 750,000 constituents. Scholars and politicians say this imbalance is why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them.

So what if we…added more seats? That’s what Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) is proposing in a new bill because he believes it’s closer to what the country’s founders originally envisioned. While expanding Congress could make our ratio of voters to representatives smaller, it also raises a difficult question: Can a larger, more crowded legislature actually govern, or are we just adding more voices to the gridlock? Vox dives into the math, the history, and the potential future of a "bigger" American democracy.

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The House of Representatives is too small. Here is one way to fix it. (Original Post) In It to Win It 10 hrs ago OP

Except that's not really the problem. It's *a* problem, but not the biggest. unblock 10 hrs ago #1

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(56,066 posts)

1. Except that's not really the problem. It's *a* problem, but not the biggest.

Reply to In It to Win It (Original post)

Thu Feb 5, 2026, 11:18 PM

10 hrs ago

Bigger problems are gerrymandering, too much money involved, and too much power of incumbency.

As a practical matter, far too few people have a real vote in choosing a representative.

Gerrymandering can make at least the winning party a nearly foregone conclusion, making the primary of the party that has a virtual lock on the district the only interesting election, if it's even contested, which it often isn't due to the power of incumbency and money issues.

Gerrymandering could be virtually eliminated by requiring districts to be "compact", I.e., in some way banning being part of a district yet wildly far from its center (there are several mathematical metrics for this). Not that we're ever likely to get a constitutional amendment for this enacted....

Too much money involved politics. Personally I think all political spending should be local. I.e., only from people who live in the district. How does it make sense for, say, some billionaire in Alabama to overwhelm an election in a district in washington state, for example?

An incumbent will always have an advantage, but something is wrong when the re-election rate is as high as it is. There's not enough accountability if the incumbent isn't worried about keeping their seat. Not sure how to fix this one, but solving the other two problems would help.

Increasing the size of the house would help, but *only* if the other problems are solved first. For instance, gerrymandering would be ever worse, as smaller districts give a partisan map designer more flexibility.

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