How the Great Compromise and the Electoral College Affect Politics

The Great Compromise was forged in a heated dispute during the 1787 Constitutional Convention: States with larger populations wanted congressional representation based on population, while smaller states demanded equal representation. To prevent the convention from dissolving into chaos, the founding fathers came up with the Great Compromise. The agreement, which created today’s system of congressional representation, now influences everything from “pork barrel” legislation to the way votes are counted in the Electoral College during presidential elections.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegates from larger states believed each state’s representation in the proposed Congress should be proportionate to population.

Smaller states with lower populations argued that such an arrangement would lead to unfair dominance by larger states in the new nation’s government and that each state should have equal representation, regardless of population.

The disagreement over representation threatened to derail the ratification of the U.S. Constitution as delegates from both sides of the dispute vowed to reject the document if they didn’t get their way. The solution came in the form of a compromise proposed by Connecticut delegates Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth.

Also known as the Sherman Compromise or the Connecticut Compromise, the deal combined elements of the Virginia Plan, favored by large states, and the New Jersey Plan, favored by small states.

Under the Great Compromise, there would be two chambers in a bicameral Congress. Seats in the House of Representatives would be allocated according to each state’s population and representatives would be elected by the people.

In the second chamber—the Senate—each state would have two senators regardless of the state’s size, and state legislatures would choose them. (In 1913, the 17th Amendment was ratified, tweaking the Senate system so that senators would be elected directly by the people.)

The plan was at first rejected, but then adopted by a slim margin on July 16, 1787.

At the time of the convention, states’ populations varied, but not by nearly as much as they do today. As a result, one of the main lingering political effects of the Great Compromise is that states with smaller populations have a disproportionately large voice in the nation’s Congress.

As political scientist George Edwards III of Texas A&M University points out, California hosts about 67 times more people than Wyoming, yet the states have the same number of votes in the Senate.

“The founders never imagined … the great differences in the population of states that exist today,” says Edwards. “If you happen to live in a low-population state you get a disproportionately bigger say in American government.”

The imbalance of power favoring smaller states in the Senate means that interests in those states, such as mining in West Virginia or hog farming in Iowa, are more likely to get attention—and money—from federal coffers.

“In the Senate when they’re trying to get to 51 votes to pass a bill, every vote counts,” says Todd Estes, a historian at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. “That’s when the smaller states can demand amendments and additions to bills to look out for their own state’s interest.”

The principle of protecting small states through equal representation in the Senate carries over into the Electoral College. Each state’s number of electoral votes is based on its combined number of representatives in the House and Senate.

That means, for example, that although Wyoming has only three votes in the Electoral College, with the smallest population of any state, each elector represents a far smaller group of people than does each of California’s 54 electors.

Some scholars see the small-state bias in the Senate as critical. The arrangement means that power in the Senate is distributed geographically, if not by population, ensuring that interests across the entire country are represented.

Gary L. Gregg II, a political scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, argues in Politico that major metropolitan areas already hold power because they are home to major media, donor, academic and government centers. The structure of the Senate and the corresponding representation in the Electoral College, he says, ensures that the interests of rural and small-town America are preserved.

Was that the intention of the Founders? Edwards is doubtful since, as he points out, the majority of Americans at the time of the Constitutional Convention lived in rural areas—not urban ones. “No one was thinking about protecting rural interests,” Edwards says. “Rural interests were dominant at the time.”

Whatever the viewpoint on the fairness of the Great Compromise’s distribution of seats in the Senate, that is unlikely to change. This is because equal-state representation in the Senate is specifically protected in the Constitution.

Under Article V of the Constitution, no state can lose its equal representation in the Senate without its consent. And no state is likely to willingly give up its say in the Senate.