Is Congress truly representative?
Dear Editor: Now that the mid-term elections are over, the pundits and the politicians are having a field day parsing the results and deciding what the voting really meant. Inevitably, they’re talking about this as an “historic” shift. Yet while the results may seem dramatic, a step back reveals that the congressional elections process has become stultified. It no longer reflects the views of the American people as accurately as it should. Why do I say this? Well, what else can we make of an election in which polls consistently showed massive unhappiness with the Congress, and yet the final numbers appear to be that fewer than 30 seats in the House (out of 435) and six in the Senate (out of 33) shifted party hands? The strongest throw-the-bums-out mood in over a decade yielded change in only seven percent of the seats in play on Election Day. If this year’s elections were a massive rebuff to Congress, why are the overwhelming majority of its incumbents coming back? To answer that, let
