Hacker News Reader

Comment by trynumber9 | Hacker News Reader

What makes rural America so numerous?

They're not so numerous; due to the way the system is set up, they have outsized impact. Wyoming with 500k people has the same amount of influence in the Senate as California with 38 million people.

That said, so far she hasn't won the popular vote either, so that's not what we should be blaming in this election.

My question is, why can't democrats see how bad and average intell. their candidate is? Trump can at least talk, give interviews and all. But other one???

> But other one???

is not a sentence.

OK.

For one, the population is way more spread out in the US than in other countries. There are only 9 cities with more than 1 million people in a country of 350 million inhabitants.

Those are local administrative areas, not cities. Using any reasonable functional definition of a city, the number of cities with a population >1 million is around 50.

I think they just have a higher reproduction rate. Shorter generations and wider ones too.

Hell I'm from a rural family that voted majority trump. I'm a bud not a stem. I'm also 33 with no kids.

It's not that it's numerous (it's not). It's that they have a lot weight because of how the electoral college works.

I think you’re confusing the electoral college with the Senate.

There are two senators per state regardless of population, so low-population rural states have an outsized influence in the Senate.

In the electoral college, each state is weighted by population. It’s unavoidably biased (just by the nature of chunking votes into seats and states) but it doesn’t consistently favor either side.

Each state gets a number of electors equal to their Congressional delegation: Representatives *and* Senators. So the overweighting of small states in the Senate does, to a smaller degree, affect the Electoral College as well (as every state gets two "free" electors).

Good point! I overlooked that. On the other hand, the larger states having large bloc votes plays in their favor.

electoral college

The electoral college for one. Massively oversized benefit, especially since the house size has been frozen. Basically every level of our government is designed to give small rural areas the advantage. It’s no wonder we are the only prosperous nation without universal healthcare and post secondary education. We give the people who contribute the least to our society free rein to run it.

No, basically every level of our country is designed to balance the voices of heavily populated areas with rural areas. It's completely ignorant of the history of our nation to claim it's intended to give rural areas an advantage, when in fact it is an attempt at compromise. And let's not forget: without that compromise our nation literally would not exist, as the large and small states wouldn't have come to an agreement otherwise.

I wouldn't say people in rural areas do the least for society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com