The 1790 Census showed 95 percent of the population living in rural America. By 1920, the number of people living in urban areas surpassed those living in rural areas and urban America has continued to grow proportionally larger ever since. Our governmental structures, however, were set up by the founding fathers to purposely give an advantage to agrarian voters over those living in city centers. The greater the disparity in the distribution of our population, the more bias our system is becoming in favor of Americans living in less populous areas. Emily Badger writes:
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 American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority, Dr. Lee said. The bias also shapes the House of Representatives. [...]
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, regardless of partisan gerrymandering.
The Electoral College then allocates votes according to a state’s congressional delegation: Wyoming (with one House representative and two senators) gets three votes; California (53 representatives and two senators) gets 55. Those two senators effectively give Wyoming three times more power in the Electoral College than its population would suggest. Apply the same math to California and it would have 159 Electoral College votes. And the entire state of Wyoming already has fewer residents than the average California congressional district.
But the bias doesn't just play out in representation, it also affects policy and funding structures.
Dr. Lee’s research has found that a significant rural bias in resources persists. You can see it in Homeland Security funding that gave Wyoming, for example, seven times as much money per capita as New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. You can see it in Alaska’s proposed “bridge to nowhere.”
“In that case,” Dr. Ansolabehere said, “Alaska has so much disproportionate power in the negotiation over funds that in order for California to get some, Alaska gets a lot — to the point of not knowing what to spend the money on.”
These calculations also mean that populous states subsidize less populous ones, which receive more resources than the tax dollars they send to Washington.
So let's get this straight—the election at least in part turned on the idea that voters in less populated states were mad about being disenfranchised by an increasingly urban America that's leaving them behind. Meanwhile, rural voters have disproportionate political power and receive government funding disproportionate to their numbers that's largely subsidized by voters living more populous areas. And now we have a tyrant for president who was elected in large part because angry rural voters favored him even though those who rejected Trump outnumber those who voted for him by nearly two million votes two million-plus votes.
And who's angry?