NYT op-ed: Political power skewed in favor of small towns; Rove is counting on them

[DeepModem Mom]

Op-Ed Contributor
Winning Small
By BRIAN MANN
Published: November 2, 2006
Saranac Lake, N.Y.

....Surely, the Republican Party is facing an electoral drubbing. And yet, President Bush and Karl Rove baldly assert that Republicans will retain control of Congress....Majorities in Congress aren’t formed by the national zeitgeist, as Mr. Rove cheerfully points out. They are built one race at a time. And in dozens of close contests this fall, the outcome will be determined largely by one often-overlooked minority group: the mostly white and mostly conservative voters who live in America’s small towns.

Residents of rural areas make up only a fifth of the country’s population....In part, the electoral importance of small towns reflects a profound rural bias hardwired into our political system. The Constitution grants two Senate seats to each state regardless of its population. As a consequence, a majority of senators are elected by voters in 26 sparsely settled states that together contain less than 18 percent of the country’s population.

A few decades ago, this uneven distribution of power didn’t matter, because rural states regularly divided their votes between the two major parties. But in recent years, low-population states like Alaska, Kansas and Wyoming have voted as a conservative bloc, favoring Republican candidates by overwhelming margins.

Today the Republican Party holds an 11-seat Senate majority, but Republican senators represent 4.5 million fewer people than their Democratic colleagues, who tend to come from urban states like California, Illinois and New York. In the 2004 elections, Democratic candidates for the Senate captured nearly 10 percent more votes than Republicans nationwide, thanks to landslide support among urbanites. Yet the Republicans still managed to gain four seats, due to victories in rural states like South Dakota and South Carolina....

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On Election Day, millions of urban Democrats will go to the polls expecting victory and dramatic change in Washington. But beware: Mr. Rove’s sunny forecast isn’t just spin. He and his party are counting on small towns to send a very different message, and to give the Republicans two more years to get it right.

(Brian Mann, a reporter for North Country Public Radio, is the author of “Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Rural Heart of America’s Conservative Revolution.”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/opinion/02mann.html