"The president of the United States is not elected by the popular vote but by the Electoral College, so that at times the man who won the latter was not the most popular candidate. In the United States, what counts is winning a majority of the right people, not the people as a whole. This truism, with roots in the origins of the US Constitution, is underscored by the often racialized character of the limits to democracy in the US political system: The right people are all too often the white people. This is certainly the case with the Electoral College, but it is even more evident in the US Senate. The 10 smallest states have a total population of slightly less than Los Angeles County’s, yet they elect one-fifth of the Senate’s membership. These states are also whiter than the United States as a whole, giving white interests preponderant representation in the Senate. (One might wonder what would happen if these small states had mostly minority populations, but the closest analogy—the exclusion of Washington, D.C., from Senate representation—suggests an answer.)"