It also encourages decisions like overcampaigning in California as a result of last minute polling in Wisconsin and Michigan looking like a coin toss. A loss is bad, but a loss that can't be marketed as illegitimate afterwards is far worse.

(To be fair, yes, getting the slave states on board a few centuries back required it. Legacy code probably wouldn't be there if it hadn't done something at one point.)

It does matter to claims of breadth of appeal, whether or not it matters elsewhere. (It's true, breadth of appeal isn't as important in the US, if you have the right narrow appeal, than it would be in a representative democracy, but the claim.made was about breadth of appeal.)

Insofar as Presidents have limited formal power and their informal power is at least as important, and is based in no small part on the perception of a democratic mandate (because whether the formal processes of the US system are democratic or not, democratic values are widespread in US culture), it actually can matter.

> And that's a feature, not a bug.

Well, it was designed in; whether it's a positive feature or a misfeatures depends on what you value.

If you value the systematic disenfranchisement that the electoral college system rewards, the racial repression that it and the Senate structure which underlies it was designed to protect (and still does, though in somewhat less odious form than it originally did), and the idea of structurally promoting tyranny of a particular minority, then, sure, it's a positive feature.