Dems v. GOP

At dinner a few weeks ago, one of my close friends mentioned something about the size of each party’s convention delegations corresponding to the relative size of each party’s voter registrations. I thought it was an excellent point, so I dug up the numbers. I actually found that she was not entirely correct, but in the process I found something else that I thought was interesting.

As of the 2004 elections, there were roughly 72M registered Democrats and 55M registered Republicans. She was right: the Democratic Party *is* bigger than the GOP.

However, the 2008 conventions will consist of 4,049 Democratic delegates and 2,380 Republican delegates. While the Democratic Party had only 31% more registered voters in 2004, it will bring 70% more delegates to its convention in 2008. Therefore, the larger convention size does NOT seem to correlate directly to the larger base of registered voters.

That being said … I think that these numbers show something much more fundamental about the Democratic Party. They don’t just believe in “Big Government” (as the GOP would have us think), but they believe in more “directly representative” government. Why do I say that? Well, according to these numbers, the Democrats will bring one convention delegate for every 18,000 registered Democratic voters while the Republicans will bring one convention delegate for every 23,000 registered Republican voters. One could interpret these numbers as supporting the notion that Democrats are 22% more “directly representative” in their convention than the Republicans.

I just love statistics … you can manipulate them to support just about any notion! ;-)