emphasizing the value of openly LGBT members of Congress. While descriptive representation has provided benefits overall, scholars have noted that some groups in the community, such as transgender and bisexual people, tend to receive less focus than gays and lesbians. Democratic backsliding At least three "well-regarded" global democracy indexes—Freedom House, Varieties of Democracy, and the Economist Intelligence Unit— "show an erosion of American democracy since 2016". Disconnect between public opinion and government policy A disconnect between "the power to set government policy" and political opinions of the general public has been noted by commentators and scholars (such as David Leonhardt). The United States "far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world," according to Steven Levitsky. Before the 2000 election, only three candidates for president won "while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term", while as of 2022 "two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote" - George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. Leonhardt points out that in one branch of the federal government—the Supreme Court—conservative legal decisions "both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular" were delivered in 2022, what is likely the beginning of a reshaping of "American politics for years, if not decades" to come by the court's "Republican appointees". This is despite the fact that the president appoints the nominees, and that presidential candidates of the Democratic Party have won the popular vote in seven out of eight last elections (from 1992-2020). In the 2020 U.S. Senate, "50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million". Explanations include: geographical sorting by ideology. "Parts of the country granted outsize power by the Constitution" (i.e. less populated states), formerly voted more or less similarly to the large states and urban areas that were granted less power. Thus "the small-state bonus" giving disproportionate power in "the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results". This is no longer the case. Rural areas are more uniformly conservative and urban areas liberal. More important is "the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College" (all states except Maine and Nebraska), which gives greater bias to Republicans. faster population growth of large (population) states than small states. The state with the largest population in 1790 was Virginia with approximately 13