The problem is that people feel so helpless in politics that getting them to care about their mostly invisible state legislature, never mind the Federal, is a Sisyphian task.
It really, really, really doesn't. If you can gerrymander Congressional districts and split North Dakota from South to get the electoral results you want, then "land matters" is just a way of saying, "I want power and I'm willing to rig elections to get it."
>We've lost sight of the fact that each state should be its own experiment in democracy
Rubbish: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-kennedy-single-paye... . Democracy is the principle that people affected by decisions should, by degrees, get a voice in those decisions. Electoral rituals are not democracy, and in fact, when an election in Louisiana or Texas can determine that people in Massachusetts and California don't get to make our own public policy choices, that's undemocratic.
It's not even remotely close, and that's why the system is so broken.