October is to political prognosticators what February is to florists and April is to accountants; namely, the time when a profession that’s peripheral to our daily concerns momentarily becomes the center of our attention. This season’s forecasting for the midterm elections is largely occupied with the partisan balance of the Senate. (The Times’ Upshot column has it seventy-one per cent likely that the Republicans will gain control. FiveThirtyEight puts the G.O.P.’s odds at sixty-one per cent.)
The folks at Who Leads Us, a project by the Women Donors Network, have posed an interesting question about the state of politics: Do we live in a reflective democracy? The short answer is no, and the long answer is also no. And the two charts below (put together by Philip Bump) prove it.
It's no secret that white men dominate politics, which we've written about before, and current projections suggest that women won't reach political parity/reflective representation for another 100 years.
You’ve probably heard these statistics before: Men make up 80 percent of the Senate and 81 percent of the House. There are just two black and four Hispanic senators. The numbers aren’t much better in the lower chamber. The fact that white men are vastly overrepresented in Congress is probably not news to anyone. But this discrepancy does not just exist at the federal level. It is prevalent across all levels of government.
