Coming to the Midwest from New England, I never realized how big states could be. From my hometown, you could get to six states in under two hours.
About 37 Rhode Islands can fit into the state of Iowa, and although I don’t think we need every state to be that small, I do think we could round our number of states up to 100 by separating regional areas into their own states.
Why would we want more states? That’s the question I get the most when asked about this, and my answer is that representatives and legislators simply can’t represent the vast areas of a state.
A state like Illinois suffers because all of the power is concentrated in Cook County and greater Chicagoland. If you’re travelling through essentially any other part of Illinois, like Cairo down south, you’ll find that the needs of those citizens aren’t being met at the state level.
Florida feels completely different when you go to the north and the panhandle, as compared to the southern portion, which has much more influence from Cuba.
So what would this look like? We’d have to expand both the Senate and the House, which would be good for both the small states and the large states.
Currently, each representative has about 750,000 constituents, which is obviously far too many for them to realistically represent. This would allow representatives to be more in touch with constituents and focused on what their actual area needs.
With Senators, they’d be closer to their state needs and hopefully less beholden to national party apparatus. We could talk about the 18th Amendment, but that would be a whole other article.
I do think certain things would get worse under this system, which is why I’m wary of wholeheartedly supporting it. I think political polarization would get worse if states were consistently either massively Republican or massively Democrat.
That being said, it’s not as though intense political polarization doesn’t currently exist, and maybe people would feel more represented if their preferred ideology had a chance of being elected.
Self-written bio: Ryan Hurley is an Iowa State senior majoring in Business Administration with a minor in political science. He enjoys discussion and is currently working on a cookbook.
