The Truth About Rural Privilege in American Politics
~ 80 percent of all Americans lives in cities, metro areas, or suburbs and those numbers have been increasing – indeed the only rural areas that have shown growth rather than shrinkage over the last decade are almost always butted up to a large Metro area.
Yet when Journalists seek “the real Americans” they always seem to go to small rural towns as if living in a small town gives you privilege, insight, or “roots” that us poor city dwellers can never understand. Why is that? Do those journalists know something that we urban Americans do not?
The simple answer to that question is a resounding Yes! Urban voters in this country are severely disenfranchised by design, rural voters, no matter how few, have all the clout in this country. It has become this way through decades of Republican machinations with voter rolls, voting laws, and most importantly, Gerrymandering extremes.
Let’s start with the fact that every state gets two Senators — so at the time of this writing, the ~588k people of Wyoming get two Senators, and the 39,355, 309 Million people of California get two Senators. Doing the math, that’s 1 senator for every 294k people in Montana, while Californians get 1 senator for 19,677,654.5 people.
Do you see how that might be a bit unfair, a bit unequal, perhaps to the point of laughing at the 14th amendment?
Then there are electors for presidential elections, and seats in congress, where the math gets slightly better when it comes to per person representation, but not by much. Because of the 435 seat cap, Wyoming has a house seat for approximately every 576K persons while Californians only gets a house seat per approximately every 760K people.
When it comes to electors, Wyoming gets one every 192,284 people, while the disenfranchised people of California only get one presidential elector every 732,189 people. Definitely not fair.
So the more land around you — the more empty country nearby, the more your vote counts, the more electoral privilege you have, the more control you have over the future direction of the country. Meanwhile you city and suburb dwellers can suck it. That’s why you shouldn’t kvetch, complain, or get even slightly angry when reporters go to the Toad Hollar Bar and Grill in Mound City, MO to interview the real rulers of America.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html
How could all of this disenfranchisement be remedied? To start congress could easily lift the cap on seats in the house of Representatives from 435, and then set the minimum number needed for a seat at whatever the least populous state’s population is, in this case it would be Wyoming at approximately 588 thousand — that would give them one seat, and/or one electoral vote depending on whether or not you effect this at the electoral college or not. California would get approximately 66- 67 seats and that would at least get us to a semblance of near equal representation.
I say near equal because red states would still gerrymander districts to disenfranchise the more populous urban voters because when you come down to brass tacks, Republicans have really hated democracy for my entire 70 year lifetime.
While giving Democracy lip service for most of the post WWII period, the GOP still traded stories about dead people voting for Kennedy, about busloads of Mexicans being sent around to polls to elect Jimmy Carter, etc., etc. Election denial has always been strong with any election Republicans lost, but it’s reached the penultimate with our current president, so our country is overdue to fix our broken electoral and elections systems.
