I’ve spent most of my life living in small towns but I’ve also spent some time in major cities—and enjoyed my big city time. But one thing I noticed was that each major city really seemed to see itself as the center…if not the universe, of their little ( or not so little) corner of the universe. To them, the concerns of small town hicks ( all racists, of course) and backwards farmers are…trivial. Beneath their notice.
Door swings both ways. I grew up in a little town, and never met anyone there who gave two shits about the fate of anyone who lived in a city, unless they were originally from a city themselves or kin to someone who was.
But that also illustrates why this argument is nonsense. Most people in every state live in cities. Yes, Wyoming too; rural though it is, more than half of Wyoming's residents live in one of her eleven cities. And on the flip side, every state has vast swathes of countryside. Like the one I grew up in,
in California. The poor hicks I grew up with -
in California - aren't empowered in any way by this scheme to give Wyoming and Montana extra votes. Votewise, they are every bit as disempowered as the poor urban Black folks. Who cares about the rights of
our farmers? Yet, our farmers feed the rest of the country, demonstrably. Guess that doesn't win them anything but a lemon in their eye? That they picked yesterday?
As long as electoral votes are assigned
by state, urban centers will always have the advantage. Because in all states, more people live in the city than in the country. Pretending there is an absolute demographic difference between red states and blue states doesn't change that reality, in any of those states. If you want to apportion votes based on whether or not the voter lives in a city or not, we need to scrap the electoral college altogether, and ignore state boundaries in favor of sociological ones. I hope I don't need to explain why that would be a disaster in practice.