Senator Cory Booker (DNJ) won a full term to the United States Congress this week, garnering 1,016,204 votes from the residents of New Jersey in an incredibly low turnout election.
The number or people is larger than the number of people who live in seven states: Montana (pop: 989,415), Delaware (POP: 897,934), South Dakota (pop: 814,180), Alaska (pop: 710,231), North Dakota (pop: 672,591), Vermont (pop: 625,741) and Wyoming (pop: 563,626),
By default, no Senator from any of these states has ever garnered the number of votes in a single election that Booker has. I’m willing to bet that the combined delegation from each of these states has never garnered the votes Booker has.
Even more telling, four of these states elected Republican Senators on the same day Booker was sent back to the Senate. In total those four United States Senators received 581,321 votes, less than 60% of what Booker receives.
In fairness, the GOP got 14.5M votes for winners of US Senate seats while the Dems only got 9.8M, so they won more seats. But it’s a skewed total since most races were in Republican states.
More telling is that it took an average of 820K votes to win a Democratic seat, and only 660K to win a Republican seat.
That a voter in NJ has less influence than those in many other states is a feature, not a bug, and I’m not even close to suggesting we should get rid of the Senate or the direct election of Senators. In fact, this kind of analysis is pretty much navel gazing, but sometimes it's gotta be done.
Just noting that it’s not really a “mandate” when one party wins the US Senate.
The House … that’s a different story (gerrymandering notwithstanding). And we got drubbed there.