No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.
You sound ripe for some travel! It's not a bad place to visit!
You may want to believe what you wrote because it helps those of us with contrary preferences to pretend that we're just better aligned to some rational truth or something, but no: there are many people in Texas and elsewhere who sincerely believe that each of those things is good and something that they want for their community.
The number or loudness of those people change when stirred up by politicians, and sometimes ideas that weren't widely considered previously are wholly seeded as part of a political strategy, but that doesn't really change that most people are fully sincere in their beliefs and that their beliefs can sometimes be radically different than your own.
I'll say that I know quite a number of people who claim to be stout libertarians (a very common stance in the south and especially in Texas) and even be much more supportive of legalizing all drugs because "government bad, personal choice good" and "government shouldn't be a babysitter." YET I've seen those same people vote for those politicians. I've seen those politicians run on those platforms and then push such agendas and then people not really care about it. Not too different from the old "I didn't speak out because I wasn't x, but then there was no one left to speak for me" quote.
Truth is humans are full of hypocrisy, for better or worse. Some of this is so we can handle nuance in an approximate way without having to invest in the computation/effort to resolve those. It is a real thing though and we need to be nuanced to deal with it, including how we discuss it.
BUT there's also a clear and measurable phenomena where politicians are not acting as good representatives. You can find many polls on things like Marijuana laws, government provided health coverage, government pension plans (cough social security cough), paid family leave, corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, wealthy not paying their fair share, complexity of taxes, return free filing, and many other things. You can find Pew and Gallup polls on this stuff running back for years, showing majority approvals. The issue, is we quibble over nuance AND oversimplify the nuance. We often pretend that the optimization functions are the same or identically conditioned. Often the difference is coming down to a focus on positive rights vs negative rights in the conditioning of the linear program. Abortion might be a good example. Liberals try to minimize the harm while conditioning on the liberty of the mother while conservatives tend to have the inverse approach. Essentially liberals will give up liberty of the unborn in favor of the currently living while conservatives are willing to give up liberty of the currently living for the unborn. You cannot maximize both liberties of the living and the unborn at the same time, there has to be a trade-off. Both want surprisingly similar things, but we frame them as extreme opposites because we are not discussing the nuance and we're arguing while we work from a different set of base assumptions assuming that the other persons are operating under the same assumptions. Which makes it quite difficult to actually understand the other person's goals and intentions.
Thing is, people are happy to prey upon this complexity and difficulties in communicating. Knowingly or unknowingly. We are often unwitting players in this as it is so easy to get trapped into the mindset that others operate under the same premise that we do. Until we understand this, we are going to have extreme difficulties in communicating. Even if we want the same things and even if we want extremely similar outcomes. I'm sure many people here have had a "stupid argument" where you realize that you and the person you're passionately arguing with are on the exact same side, just expressing your views in different ways. It's often embarrassing and we laugh about it because we __are__ fucking idiots. Yes, this includes (especially) me. Don't listen to me, I'm a fucking idiot.
Like one rural vote is worth 10x what one urban vote is worth? Or is that just for federal elections?
The republicans have been trying to dissuade a lot of voters which to me, as a rather left (European left) leaning European seems very undemocratic.
The federal Senate is 2 Senators per state, no voting representation for territories (places not in admitted states) or Washington DC. So Vermont and Wyoming, with populations around 600,000 each, have the same vote strength as California (39M) and Texas (31M) -- 1.2 million people equated to 70 million.
Gerrymandering ("from Gerry's salamander-shaped district") is the practice of the ruling party in any state drawing their districts for the federal House of Representatives so that their party wins multiple districts (by, say, 52-48%) and making the other party win a smaller number of districts (by 90-10%). Each district is required to have roughly the same number of people in it. The shaping is bad, but the per-population equality of representation is nearly optimal.
Academics generally conclude that of the 435 districts, no more than 40 or 50 are actually representative of the political demographics of the state as a whole.
I feel like the concept of having more choices to vote for would be appealing to most US voters - but I can't imagine such an initiative would be successful
Some states, including New York, allow a candidate to be run simultaneously by several parties, and for voters to then vote for the candidate with a particular party endorsement. This nominally allows a small party to gain status -- say, if the Green Party (tiny) were to nominate Biden (unlikely, but bear with me) and he wins the presidency, then for the purposes of New York State, the Green Party would move closer to being a recognized major party.
The overriding problem is that the Constitution was written with a deliberate ignorance of the concept of parties -- so much so that in the original 1789 document, the runner-up of the Presidential race becomes Vice-President. That didn't work out well; fixed by the 12th amendment.
The other gigantic issue, that has only become clear in the last two decades, is that an astounding amount of the government runs on convention rather than regulation.
Fixing these things would require a significant restructuring of the Constitution, and that opens up doors to... everyone.
I grew up extremely religious in Texas... I can assure you that there are plenty of people who want these things.
The good news is things are changing. Some members of my family who effectively spent their entire lives trying to overturn Roe, are now totally overwhelmed and distraught by the after effects, and what an awful person Donald Trump is. Truly a dog-that-caught-the-car situation.
13 states (Texas included) had trigger laws already on the books to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned, and are now in effect. This was a big thing all over the place when it happened.
But these tragedies are not something any given person in the US is likely to ever encounter first-hand. It's a real big country and your frequency measure is more "geez, don't you thinn we should do something?!" more than "whelp, let's hope I don't get shot today"
As far as geographic difference and the prior commenter's statement, the biggest relevant difference for you would be that you will probably never see someone bearing a gun in San Fransisco and will almost certainly see many people doing over the course of any stay in Texas.
That's an internal cultural thing, and involves a combination of regional regulations and regional aesthetics. Both states are safe, though.
Frankly -- if this is an otherwise exciting opportunity for you, you really shouldn't let the gun thing get in your way.
Now consider that the United States is a roughly similar size, both in land mass and population.
You'll find a lot of diversity, even if the language is the same.