Bigger Congress would be better Congress

With the 2026 primaries rapidly approaching, you may well live in a jurisdiction where Democrats or Republicans are actively contesting nominations for Congress, state legislature, or local office. All voters can, of course, play a role in setting the table for this year’s US Senate contest.

Are you up on these races? Even for political junkies, keeping up with it all can be a challenge. And it’s about to get harder. If present trends continue, North Carolina will have added enough new residents by 2030 — and other states will have lost the requisite residents — for us to gain a 15th seat in the US House of Representatives.

I’m all for North Carolina securing more influence over national policymaking (our expanded congressional delegation would also mean bigger clout in presidential primaries and the Electoral College). On the matter of House seats, however, my preferences are far more radical. A one-seat gain is paltry. I think North Carolina should gain 39 seats.

That is to say, I think the House of Representatives is far too small. When the Founders created the institution in 1787, they apportioned one member for every 33,000 residents of the new United States. A key framer of the Constitution, James Madison, proposed that once the House reached 200 members, it ought to grow automatically to maintain a ratio of one member for every 50,000 constituents. If districts grew significantly more populous than that number, he argued, the resulting US House would be too elitist and its individual numbers would lack “proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents.”

While Madison’s congressional-apportionment plan never came to fruition, the chamber did grow periodically throughout the early decades of the republic. Since expanding to 435 voting representatives in 1913, however, the US House has grown increasingly unrepresentative.

House districts currently contain an average of 761,000 people. When the current cap was instituted in 1913, districts averaged 211,000 constituents. If that were the ratio now, the House would have approximately 1,572 members. North Carolina would hold 50 of those seats today, a delegation that would grow to 53 seats or more after 2030.

Sound preposterous? I admit that expanding the chamber so quickly might be hard to pull off. A bigger House would differ from the current institution not just in degree but in kind, with significant changes in organization, staffing, and operations. In 2021, a team of scholars proposed a more gradual approach: adding 150 seats. In that scenario, North Carolina would have 18 seats today and as many as 21 seats after 2030.

Why expand Congress? Many wise reformers have offered many sound arguments over the years. It would restore a clearer distinction between the House and Senate. It would enhance local representation and constituent service. It would diversify the chamber in a variety of ways. And it would reduce the extent to which House districts are gerrymandered to favor a particular party or incumbents of either party.

That last point deserves emphasis. As North Carolina’s history makes abundantly clear, the temptation to engage in creative political cartography extends across party lines and is exceedingly difficult to resist or constrain. I’ve fought for redistricting reform my entire adult life, and will do so again in advance of the 2030 Census. But I also admit that neither a “nonpartisan” commission nor judicial oversight will ever be a foolproof defense against abuse, and even reformers sometimes disagree about whether “good” maps maximize proportionality (the extent to which district-by-district outcomes reflect statewide tallies of partisan preferences) or competitiveness (the number of seats that could change hands from cycle to cycle, which may well produce wildly disproportionate outcomes).

Vastly increasing the number of US House districts won’t eliminate gerrymandering. But legislative districts are, on the whole, more competitive than congressional districts. And in states and countries with lower ratios of constituents to representatives, gerrymandering is less effective.

In this one area of government, I submit that bigger is, indeed, better.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.