What's best for densely populated urban areas is not necessarily best - or even good - for sparsely populated areas. Sometimes finding the most acceptable and most appropriate solution for the entire country means that the urban centers might not get their way all the time.
I see no reason to think that urban centers will get their way all the time. Nor do I think that urbanites are some monolithic bloc who vote in lock step.
Maybe the reason you and I are disagreeing is the binary "urbanites v ruralites". I don't see America that way at all. Country kids move to the city because there's no future for them in Bumfuckistan. City folks move to the country because they get fed up with the downsides of urban life. Then there's the "suburbs", where I've lived most of my life.
Call me nuanced if you must, but I don't see this big chasm.
Tom
I'm not saying they're monoliths. What I'm saying is that the needs and priorities of densely populated urban areas tend to be more like one another (despite many difference between NY and LA), and those tend to be substantially different than the needs and priorities of sparsely populated rural areas.
Of course there will be some variation. But let's take some really basic items. Let's talk about... transportation and medical access.
Urban areas, even ones with very different cultural backgrounds, will probably have a need and a desire for robust public transportation infrastructure, and investments in expansion and maintenance of it. They'll want and need bus systems, subways or lightrails, ride shares, etc. And they'll want some element of public subsidization of those services, so that they can 1) provide accessible transportation to more people and 2) reduce traffic congestion and the risk of accidents and 3) reduce pollution.
Rural areas aren't going to care about that. It's off the top completely unfeasible to provide those services to a rural area, there aren't enough people and the locations are too far apart.
Urban areas might very well want and need to invest in more urgent care and primary care clinics, as well as multiple imaging centers. They may want more hospitals, especially hospitals with specific illness focuses (Cancer Treatment Centers, Neurological Centers). And they may want those services to be subsidized so that care can be provided to lower income or homeless people and prevent the spread of illnesses in a dense population.
Rural areas might want access to those services... but it makes zero sense to build a Cancer Center in Minot ND. Rural areas would benefit far more from having integrated medical centers that have some hospital inpatient/outpatient services, as well as urgent care and primary care services in one location.
And for the kicker - Rural areas would benefit from having subsidized transportation services that are more like a taxi that can support getting people from far spread locations to those integrated medical centers, or can transport them into a city for more severe or specialized services.
Even if each given geography has different needs and priorities, the underlying nature of the needs of densely populated areas and the needs of sparsely populated areas are
qualitatively different.
There are also going to be needs that vary by geography that are independent of population density to some degree - but I might argue that even then, the densely populated area might end up with a priority position. Consider the desert southwest, which includes very rural parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Las Vegas, and Southern California as well as Metropolitan regions in each of those states. There's a definite need for water in those areas - and this is true whether they're urban or rural. But there's a real risk that priority for water distribution might end up going to cities than to rural areas. And that's going to end up including non-essential water usage for prettification of landscapes in those urban areas.
The electoral college is far from perfect. But at present it is the only mechanism that provides at least some means by which the varying needs and priorities of different geographies and different population densities can have some degree of balance imposed upon them. There are better methods out there - but NOT when paired with FPTP voting.
