![[OC] The US is Growing, but the House of Representatives is Not.](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/8u2csvmhigkg1-1024x1024.png "[OC] The US is Growing, but the House of Representatives is Not.")
US population per seat in the house of representatives(1789-2025, 1st-119th Congress).
Data on number of House seats is from history.house.gov, historical and projected population data is from census.gov.
For the congresses during the civil war, when representatives from seceding states were expelled from the House, I have omitted the populations of states not represented in the House in the given session.
Prior to the 1920 census, congress(usually) added seats to the House to ensure no state lost representatives; however, following the 1920 census, for political and logistical reasons congress capped the House at 435 seats, where it sits today. The original apportionment procedure has been simulated on slide 2, corresponding to minimally expanding the House every 5th congress to abide by this precedent.
Contemporary ideas for expanding the House include the "Cube Root Rule", where the number of seats is the cube root of the US population, derived from observations of other democracies, and the "Wyoming Rule", where the number of seats is determined by the US population divided by the population of the smallest state. Yet other ideas include capping the population per representative at a fixed number, Washington proposed 30,000, which would put today's House at ~11,500 seats, adding a fixed number of seats to the House today, or to tie the number to a different root of the population.
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Posted by graphsarecool
34 Comments
Source: [history.house.gov](http://history.house.gov) and [census.gov](http://census.gov) Tools: Python with NumPy, Pandas, and matplotlib.
This is biggest undiscussed problem in the US government and has led to so much of our f*cked up situation. Much of the last 26 years’ worth of madness would have been avoided if the House had been expanded as the country grew. The Electoral College wouldn’t penalize large states as much, Bush and Trump wouldn’t have won in 2000 and 2016, and the Democrats would control the House.
I really feel like the number of represntatives in the house is a root cause of the political dysfunction we Americans feel with our governmental system. I am happy to see Representative Sean Casten bringing forward a bill to increase the size of the house, but feel like it is unlikely to get any traction because of the existing political dysfunction…
I never even thought about this. Definitely a huge problem. That will never be resolved.
I think 1700 representatives is too many. But the way they are proportioned is wrong. I think it makes sense to have every representative represent a fixed number of people. So every ten years the census gives us the population divide it by like 500 or 750 representatives and then the districts get reapportioned accordingly.
Gerrymandering would need to be completely eliminated before bringing in more reps to make sense.
Which I am both for.
Is there meaning to the vertical ticks on marks in the first graph?
The first session of Congress was around 1 rep per 60k citizens. It now ranges from 450k to 850k. Unfortunately this has made it much easier to find bottlenecks to gerrymander, diluting representation even more. The Senate already favors land over people, the House has slowly become the same. The 450k figure is for rural areas while the 850k number is for cities.
Yea it’s really dumb. The idea is you should be able to know your representative but most representative hundreds of thousands of people
I’m all for it. If they’re going to buy off our representatives, make them have to buy off thousands of them.
I actually think a lot of the reason why things that have passed in other western countries like universal healthcare for example is that the majority have parliamentary systems. The legislative part of the democracy has more power compared to the us presidential system.
DID YOU KNOW?
[Working-class Americans make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/oct/04/few-us-politicians-working-class)
Expanding the house would go a long way toward getting proper REPRESENTATION.
So don’t hold your breath.
The other issue is the fact that the senate can block everything if you don’t have 60 senators and every state gets 2 senators. It’s a broken system with no repair, and likely to end with the US balkanizing. Every empire dies the same way. Rapid expansion and population growth leads to large population sectors with drastically different beliefs. When these sectors aren’t given equal representation due to “tradition” they break apart and do their own thing, often better. Mind you this is the origin of the United States.
My unpopular stance is Congress need to be paid more. They are responsible for incredible amounts of budget but are paid almost nothing in comparison. Hence we get into situations where it is too easy and cheap to buy them off behind the scenes.
Just increasing the number of reps would dilute their influence, but may have the same impact of making it harder to buy the influence. Accountability becomes very hard if you have 1500 representatives.
The first amendment on the list of amendments sent to the states that became the bill of rights was on this topic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Crafting_amendments
“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. ”
(It did not pass, and the 3rd and 4th on that list are the current 1st and 2nd)
It isn’t productive to have over 400 people sitting in a room trying to agree on a plan. That’s much higher than the number of humans who can participate in a meeting.
If you want to increase the number of representatives as a way to distribute power fairly, you’d first need to change the operating of congress so it isn’t based around having a big meeting in the same time and place.
Remember that when the congress rules were established, there was no such thing as internet, telephone, or telegraph, and written messages took weeks to deliver. Back then, a speech in congress was honestly a decent approach for members to learn about each other’s opinions.
That hasn’t been the case in your lifetime, though. The concept of congress is obsolete.
VOX just did a great video on this subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhQGHY44XPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhQGHY44XPM)
The issue with expanding the house is that it becomes unmanageable to whip votes and write successful legislation with more people than are currently involved. Really over like 150 you get issues. One thing that would really fix matters is if we had regional congresses that allowed for legislation to be crafted at a level between the states and the federal government, and then you could have regional representatives in a smaller House of Reps. But in the current political climate a suggestion like this would cause sectionalism, and also, it would require a constitutional amendment so it probably would never happen.
Also, we need to get rid of first past the post voting and use proportional voting or single transferable vote at a national level, but there is no political appetite for this because it would weaken the power of the two existing parties.
Not to mention gerrymandering. Oh and campaign finance corruption. Oh, and…
I question the necessity of representatives altogether. There is no longer a practical need for them. Nation wide direct vote. Divide nothing by state or county that isn’t specific to those states or counties.
Going cube root is great and all — 700 reps or 81 for Calfornia.
But it could also lead to greater gerrymandering issues. We also need mutli-rep districts.
Some level of universal proportional representation (so getting rid of FPTP and gerrymandering), plus expanding the size of the house (so it reflects more what the founders intended), plus universal ranked choice voting all seem like pretty solid beginnings for fixing this mess we’ve found ourselves in.
As much as the Democratic Party would love to increase its footprint, individual Democrat representatives would not want to water down their own power … so this wouldn’t gain traction.
Is the Wyoming rule that every state gets 1 rep per the population of least populated state?
But corporations like this because they have to bribe less people to get their agenda
One issue is non-voting population counting towards apportionment.
California and Texas are the two major offenders there. A Resident Alien, someone who is not a naturalized citizen but allowed to permanently live in the US, counts for the census. This means they count for representation in the House of Representatives. However a Resident Alien may not legally vote, only naturalized citizens. With large populations of people who may not vote but still count for representation you have states disproportionately represented based upon voter numbers.
However the entire reason the system was set up the way it was is to focus on regional government not centralized government. The states have more power to legislate than the federal government because California might have a better understanding of what it needs than someone who lives in New York. A person who lives in an area with working mass transit might have no problem banning internal combustion vehicles from public roadways, meanwhile someone who lives where it takes longer to take public transit than it does to ride a bicycle for ten miles might feel differently. The House was apportioned by population. This way anything that passes has the support of the people, in theory. The Senate is equal between the states, so that in theory the coastal states can’t just decide to turn the interior of the country into an unregulated landfill because “We voted and we outnumber you.”
Personally, I want to see yearly purges of the voter rolls in every state. 10% randomized with immunity for 10 years. If you are purged a letter is sent to your registered address stating you need to re-register. Then Reps are calculated based on registered voters, not the census. It makes sense, since we want voters represented and this would allow yearly as opposed to once a decade updates.
As weird as this is, it is just barely in the top 5 things that would be damaging to democracy in this country.
The Senate, Gerrymandering, the Electoral College, lack of ranked choice voting, lack of multi-member districts.
Just having more guys in one house is not going to help much.
The second graph proposes 1750 representatives. If 435 people can’t figure out how to lead a country, what makes you think adding more cooks to the kitchen will?
I’m for increasing the number of representatives, but I do think there should be a reasonable limit
A couple items worth throwing in here to further demonstrate the severity of the problem: representatives with the fewest and most constituents. The gap is crazy high and it’s tremendously worse when you look at the senate.
California has nearly 40 million people; Wyoming has about 600K. Each California senator represents about 67 times the number of people as a Wyoming senator.
There have been some interesting insights into why it hasn’t expanded. One of the keys is that there literally isn’t room. Apparently it’s already very tough to get a physical space to work out of at the Capitol. I think there are ideas being kicked around on how to expand office space, but I don’t know where that is currently. I think there is also incentive not to expand as it gives reps more power and less accountability. This issue is true even at the state level, where I believe that most states are dealing with the same issue.
Seems particularly fitting that the second graphic looks like it’s giving us all a big middle finger.
Somehow I struggle to believe that 11,000 politicians will get more work done than 435 politicians. The only potential upside I can see is that it’ll cost billionaires and their lobbyists a lot more money to buy votes.
I forgot the Youtuber’s name whose whole channel is about US history and he kept calling his US reps to pass a bill regarding the increase in House of Representatives seats. Kudos to him!
This is genuinely one of the bigger reasons we are where we are. A cap on the house with a growing population and a minimum of 1 seat per state means a consistent tilting of voting power toward those in lower population states, making federal laws represent an ever decreasing portion of the population
The Senate already has this issue, although by design, but the House is meant to be the portion that scales with population, but we have it set up where it doesn’t
Having the cap of representatives being proportional in some way to the total US population would be the cleanest solution, since the minimum of 1 per state I think is good, but all citizens should be roughly equally represented
As an example, it’s 760,000ish people in California per representative and 577,000ish people in Wyoming per representative, meaning in the House a Wyoming Voter has about 32% more voting power than a California resident…then this effect is compounded by the Senate situation (1 senator per roughly 20,000,000 California residents vs 1 senator per 289,000 residents in Wyoming, meaning a Wyoming voter counts as about 69 California voters), and you end up with the government heavily being representative of lower population states
The reapportionment act is one of the dumbest things the American congress has ever done.