Rupert Cornwell: The march of American conservatism
[Rupert Cornwell writes for The Independent.]
Christmas came early this year for America's conservatives, and I'm not talking about the midterm "shellacking" suffered by Barack Obama's Democrats. The instrument of their joy was something that's been around ever since the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution: the census.
Individual elections come and go; you win some, you lose some. But the long-term conclusions to be drawn from the latest 2010 census – the 23rd such exercise since the first was held in 1790, a year after George Washington became president – are clear. Slowly but ineluctably, the US is becoming more conservative. And if Republicans play their cards right, a bonanza awaits.
The reason is simple. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the states according to the population returns of the census, with each congressional district representing about 700,000 people. And as the relative populations of the states change, so does their number of congressional seats, and the number of their votes in the electoral college that ultimately elects presidents...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
Christmas came early this year for America's conservatives, and I'm not talking about the midterm "shellacking" suffered by Barack Obama's Democrats. The instrument of their joy was something that's been around ever since the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution: the census.
Individual elections come and go; you win some, you lose some. But the long-term conclusions to be drawn from the latest 2010 census – the 23rd such exercise since the first was held in 1790, a year after George Washington became president – are clear. Slowly but ineluctably, the US is becoming more conservative. And if Republicans play their cards right, a bonanza awaits.
The reason is simple. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the states according to the population returns of the census, with each congressional district representing about 700,000 people. And as the relative populations of the states change, so does their number of congressional seats, and the number of their votes in the electoral college that ultimately elects presidents...