Even as the rural United States laments its economic weakness, it retains disproportionate electoral strength.
Rural voters were able to elect Donald Trump despite Hillary Clinton's steep margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least-populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before -- more people live in California than in the nation's 21 least-populous states combined. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage.
"If you're talking about a political system that skews rural, that's not as important if there isn't a major cleavage between rural and urban voting behavior," said Frances Lee, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "But urban and rural voting behavior is so starkly different now, so that this has major political consequences for who has power."
The Electoral College is just one example of how an increasingly urban country has inherited the political structures of a rural past. Today, states containing just 17 percent of the U.S. population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority, Lee said.
Today, the influence of rural voters also evokes deeply rooted ideals about who should have power in the United States. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the strength of the nation would always derive from its agrarian soil.
"They had this vision of what they called the 'yeoman farmer': this independent, free-standing person who owed nothing to anybody, who didn't receive any payments from the government, who didn't live by a wage, but who could support himself and his family on a farm growing everything they needed -- and that these were the people who were going to be the backbone of democracy," said Gerald Gamm, a political scientist at the University of Rochester in New York.
When the framers of the Constitution were still debating the shape of institutions we have today, 95 percent of the U.S. was rural, as the 1790 census classified the population. The Connecticut Compromise at the time created the Senate: one chamber granting equal voice to every state. It balances the House, where more populous states spoke louder.
And they made sure the compromise stuck. Equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the U.S. Constitution that cannot be amended. But even as a deliberately undemocratic body, the Senate has slipped further out of alignment with the U.S. population over time.
The Senate hasn't simply favored sparsely populated states; politicians in Washington created sparsely populated states to leverage the Senate's power.
"When we talk about small-state bias, all of that was an intentional policy choice," said Jowei Chen, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.
Republicans in Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers who would move to territories that would eventually become states -- creating more Senate seats and Electoral College votes for a Republican Party eager to keep government control away from Southern Democrats. They even divided the Dakota Territory into two states, worth twice the political power.
Suspicion of big cities also appears in the sites of state capitals. Many states put their capitals in their geographical center, not necessarily where the most people lived. New York's capital is Albany, not New York City; Missouri's capital is Jefferson City, not St. Louis.
The state legislatures there also grew significantly less representative as the U.S. urbanized. In 1961, when lawyers in Tennessee brought what would be a seminal case before the Supreme Court challenging the practice, the state Legislature had not reapportioned its districts to reflect population change in 60 years. Maryland was still using districts drawn in 1867.
Even states that had constitutions requiring equal population districts were ignoring them. Florida, Georgia and New Mexico gave small counties 100 times the voting power of the most populous ones. In California, Amador County (population 14,294) had the same representation in the state's Senate as Los Angeles County (population 6,038,771).
"They justified it because that was a cultural norm; it was just the way things were," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor of government.
Rural legislators had no incentive to change the system: "They just let it keep getting worse," Ansolabehere said. "You're in power. Why change?"
By the mid-20th century, no state approximated majority rule. Ansolabehere and James Snyder Jr. wrote in their book The End of Inequality that America at the time had some of the most unequal representation in the world. A series of Supreme Court cases beginning with that Tennessee complaint upended this system and established the standard that equal representation means "one person, one vote." Not one town, one vote. Or one county, one senator. Only the U.S. Senate, protected by the Constitution, remained unchanged.
Still, the House retains a rural bias. Republican voters are more efficiently distributed across the country than Democrats, who are concentrated in cities. That means that even when Democrats win 50 percent of voters nationwide, they invariably hold fewer than 50 percent of House seats.
The Electoral College then allocates votes according to a state's congressional delegation. Wyoming, the least-populous state, has one House representative and two senators, so it gets three votes. California, the most-populous state, has 53 representatives and two senators, so it gets 55 votes. That means each of Wyoming's Electoral College votes represents about 194,000 people, while each of California's Electoral College votes represents about 697,000 people.
Apply the Wyoming math to California, critics say, and it would have 159 Electoral College votes. The entire state of Wyoming has fewer residents than the average California congressional district.
A Section on 11/21/2016