It's not about red and blue, although that happens to be the way it breaks down. It's about the rural or lower-populated areas, still having a voice. The fact that the rural communities tend to vote differently, and oftentimes opposite, the big cities, is giving us direct insight into how they view themselves and their needs. This data, this information, should be cherished and analyzed, as a means to trying to understand one another better. The one-sided echo chambers steeped in their own rhetoric, are the real hazard to democracy.
I feel like Brad’s point and some of this discussion get us to a central point.
States and their composition are kind of random. The EC treats them as one unit, and that’s always going to create some friction because of that natural diversity.
IMHO the EC is less of an issue than governance in general, because the President is the executive branch and not the legislative branch.
To the extent that they're electing members of the HoR, it's a local issue entirely. So the red parts of CA get R representatives and the blue parts get D representatives. The Senate invariably gets less granular, so a red guy in CA can't get an R Senator and a blue guy in WY can't get a D Senator, which obviously makes it difficult because in most places moving to a different state for different political representation is infeasible unless you work on/near a border. Certainly not feasible here in Orange County because the nearest state (NV) is a 4 hour drive.
But that's why I tried to break it down the way I did. As I mentioned, the Central Valley farmers are all constantly pissed off because they think that Sacramento is selling out their water rights to us down here in the SoCal cities. They definitely feel
even in their own state that they're not represented. Same with the "state of Jefferson" people--they're farmers and ranchers, in some of the most rural areas in CA and OR, and they simply don't have enough population to get their voices heard in Sacramento or Salem.
It's also why I don't think Orange County fits with rural Southern California. We're a rich, coastal, suburban to lightly urban, county. It's true that we're a pretty solidly red county, but our needs from a governance perspective fit LA or San Diego counties more than they do Imperial or Kern counties. We just don't like the way they govern in LA so we do it differently; we actually enforce crimes, for example...
This is first and foremost why federalism is important. There are some policies of governance that by nature NEED to be very different for me in Orange County as they would someone in rural Wyoming, despite the fact that we may vote for the same political party. Unless a policy MUST be federal and uniform coast to coast, they should be as local as possible.
But it's also why massive states like California or Texas don't make sense. Because California or Texas aren't homogenous, so just like the difference between Orange County and rural Wyoming, the governance needs between Austin (Travis County) with a population of >1.3M and Deaf Smith County (picked purely due to funny name) with a population of <19K are going to be very different.
The bigger the polity, the harder it is to serve everyone. Which is why I see the concept that
@SFBadger96 put together as a really interesting discussion, but would make it about governance, not about the Electoral College.
