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The One Minute Geographer: The Heavy Hand of Geography on the American Federal System
The United States Population in Thirds
We’ll start with a quick look at the simple map above that divides the population of the USA into thirds. Each of the three shades on the map have about one-third of the US population of about 331.5 million people by the 2020 Census. Only four states, dark blue, make up one-third of the US population.
California leads the Big Four pack with 39.5 million people followed by Texas (29.1 million), Florida (21.5) and New York 20.0). The Big Four combined have 110.4 million residents — exactly 33.3% of the US total. (There’s a table at the bottom of this post if you want to see the numbers.)
The next 11 states combined (middle shading) have another 108.7 million residents — 32.8%. These range from Pennsylvania (13.0 million) to Massachusetts (7.0).
All the remaining 30 states and DC have fewer than 7 million people, down to 577,000 in Wyoming. These states and DC are home to another third, 112 million people (33.9%).
The Foibles of the Electoral College
Now it gets more interesting.
Political representation in the United States is based on the idea that Senators and members of the House of Representatives represent geographical units as much as people. Two Senators represent each state and members of the House represent their districts as much as they do the people who live within these spatial districts.
The number of Senators and Representatives is also used to determine the number of electors in the Electoral College, the body that technically determines our president after votes are cast. There are 435 members of the House and 100 Senators, so there are 535 electors from states. The District of Columbia is also given three electors even though DC has no voting representation in either body of Congress, so the total of number of electors comes to 538.
Thus the title FiveThirtyEight, the well-known blog about polling aggregation by Nate Silver, originally writing for the New York Times. A presidential candidate needs a majority of the Electors to win, so because 538 is an even number, the magic number of Electors needed to avoid a tie becomes…
