Analysis: Rural Voters Don’t Wield Disproportionate Power in Senate, Electoral College

In a previous article, we addressed the inaccurate assertion that rural voters control a disproportionate share of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, let's address the common claim that rural voters wield an unfair share of power in the Senate and Electoral College.

I won't keep you waiting. They don't.

People who are worried about unequal representation in the federal government will often cite the small-state bias to support the notion that rural voters have an unfair advantage in the Electoral College and Senate. The small-state bias is the outsized influence states with small populations have in the Senate and Electoral College.

But that argument is based largely on a misunderstanding of what “rural” is. At the state level, rurality is not synonymous with having a small population. While it is true that states with smaller populations have the same number of Senate seats as larger states and a disproportionate share of electoral votes, rurality has nothing to do with it. That’s because most rural Americans don’t live in states that have unequal federal power.

So, what exactly is the small-state bias, and why do people think it benefits rural voters?

What Is the Small-State Bias?

In simple terms, the small-state bias refers to the uneven power that small states wield compared to their larger counterparts. But the precise definition differs based on whether we’re referring to the Senate or the Electoral College.

In the Senate, the small-state bias refers to each state having two senators, regardless of its population size. It doesn’t matter that California’s population exceeds Rhode Island’s population by almost 38 million residents. Both states get two Senate seats.

The small-state bias also affects the Electoral College because a state's electoral votes are based on its number of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The nation’s smallest states, like Delaware, get a minimum of three electoral votes, one for its single seat in the House, and two for the state’s senators.

But the number of electoral votes a state has is not proportionate to its population. Larger states like Texas have disproportionately fewer electoral votes compared to smaller states like Delaware, exemplifying the small-state bias.

What is rural?

Federal agencies use over a dozen definitions of rural. But at their core, those definitions are generally variations on two predominant categorization systems — one, the OMB’s Metropolitan Statistical Area, which goes down to the county level, and two, the Census definition, which is based primarily on population density. The Census definition subdivides counties down to the census block level, meaning that parts of a county may be rural and other parts urban.

The Census Bureau uses the smallest scale at which we can measure rurality. The census block is about the size of a neighborhood block. The Census definitions, which were revised for the 2020 census, says census blocks with a population of 5,000 residents or 2,000 housing units are urban. Everywhere that is not urban is rural. Using the Census definition, these rural places can range anywhere from an uninhabited desert to a small community.

Because the census definition of rural is the most granular definition available, it captures more detail than other measures. It’s also one of the more generous estimates of rurality that exist, biasing estimates in favor of rural malapportionment.

In the OMB system, metropolitan areas are defined county by county, not down to the census block. The entire county is either metropolitan or it’s not, based on the size of a city in that county or commuting patterns. The OMB considers all other counties to be “nonmetropolitan.”

That might sound unequal, but it’s not due to the rural population in those small states. Predominantly urban states like Delaware and Rhode Island, where rural residents constitute only 17% and 9% of the population, respectively, are also overrepresented in the Senate.

Let’s set aside the Electoral College for now and just focus on the Senate.

Does the Senate Favor Rural Voters?

According to the Census Bureau’s definition of rural, most rural Americans don’t live in a state that has a disproportionate share of senators relative to its population.

That’s because only 43% of rural Americans live in a state with a smaller than average population size, and 29% of the residents in those states are rural, according to the census. A little over a third of the residents in the top 10 smallest states live in areas that the census defines as rural.

Why are we using a different definition of rural?

The Daily Yonder primarily uses the OMB nonmetro definition as a proxy for rural in our analysis because it’s compatible with other monthly and annual datasets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDA, and many, many more.

But in my previous coverage of rural Representation in the House of Representatives, I used the Census definition of rural to analyze voter distribution. That’s because the census doesn’t release data on rural populations at the district level, so I had to estimate rural populations using GeoCorr, an online program created by the Missouri Census Data Center. Geocorr only estimates rural populations using the census definition of rural.

To maintain consistency with our previous coverage of rural politics, I’ll include the OMB rural figures alongside the census figures in dropdown boxes. Click the plus (+) sign at the right of the rectangle to learn more about how the OMB numbers differ from the census numbers.

In other words, the majority of people who benefit from the small-state bias are urban or suburban, not rural.

While rural voters in small states like Delaware, New Hampshire, and North Dakota are overrepresented in the Senate relative to their populations, the urban voters, who make up the majority of residents in those states, are also overrepresented.

Census data shows that only four states have rural majority populations. Those states are Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, and Mississippi. Only 6% of the total rural American population lives in those states. The remaining 94% of rural Americans live in states where the predominant population is urban or suburban.

Are rural voters favored in the Senate according to the OMB definition of rural?

About a quarter of the residents in states with smaller than average population sizes are nonmetropolitan, or rural, according to the OMB system. Compare that to the 29% who are rural in the census definition.

About half of the nonmetropolitan population lives in a state with a smaller than average population, compared to the 43% in the census definition.

Only 8% of nonmetro Americans live in states with majority rural populations, compared to the 6% in the census.

Inequalities in the Electoral College

Most states practice a winner-take-all approach to the Electoral College. In this system, all of a state’s electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who won the popular vote in the state.

Nebraska and Maine, however, practice the congressional district method. In this method, electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district, while the remaining two electoral votes, representing the two senate seats, go to the statewide winner.

In the congressional district method, electoral votes can be split between candidates if the popular vote varies by district, unlike the winner-take- all method in which all of a state’s electoral votes have to go to one candidate.

Because electoral votes aren’t distributed proportionate to the popular vote, it’s possible that a candidate who won the national popular vote can lose the Electoral College vote, and therefore lose the election.

This happened twice in recent memory. In 2000, Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush lost the popular vote by half a million votes to his Democratic challenger Al Gore, but ultimately won the Electoral College. The event stirred a national controversy that one Guardian reporter called a right-wing coup.

Most recently, a mismatch between the Electoral College and the popular vote happened when, despite losing the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race against Hillary Clinton.

Critics have rightly pointed out the inequality in the system, in particular how it disenfranchises voters of color. And although the Electoral College system might not be perfect, its inequality is not caused by rural voters.

The Electoral College Bias Is About Small Population, not Rurality

With a population of 39 million residents and 54 electoral votes, California has both more people and more electoral votes than any other state in the nation.

It’s fair that California has more electoral votes than a state like Delaware, which has a population close to one million residents and only three electoral votes. But when we take into account the difference in population size, the numbers don’t come out so evenly.

California has about 0.13 electoral votes per 100,000 residents, while Delaware has about 0.30 votes per 100,000, almost twice as many as California. A perfectly equitable system would give every state the exact same number of votes per 100,000.

But rural voters are not generally the beneficiaries of the system’s bias towards small states. Only 10% of rural voters live in a state that has more than the average amount of electoral votes per 100,000 people.

Approximately two-thirds of the population in these overrepresented states are urban or suburban, not rural. Among the 16 states with more than the average share of electoral votes per 100,000 residents, only Vermont and Maine have majority rural populations. But rural voters in Vermont and Maine constitute only about two percent of the total rural population.

Does the Electoral College benefit rural voters under the OMB definition of rural?

According to the OMB definition of rural, about 14% of rural voters live in states with more than the average amount of electoral votes per 100,000, compared to 10% of rural voters in the census definition.

The OMB figures are the same as census figures regarding the urban populations in states with more than the average amount of electoral votes. In both scenarios, about two-thirds of the populations in these states are metropolitan.

(This article is a follow up to an analysis we published in May, where I deconstructed the myth of rural malapportionment - the idea that rural voters have a disproportionate number of seats in the House of Representatives.)

Daily Yonder reporter Sarah Melotte lives in Western North Carolina and focuses on data reporting.