[tallowen]

> The house also favors less populous states, even if not by design.

Out of curiosity, how does this happen in practice? My understanding was that seats were divided up by population (giving equal voice to those in more densely populated areas).

[dangoor]

I believe the problem is that the number of seats in Congress has not increased in 100 years despite a huge increase in population. This has caused a distortion by giving tiny states more representation than they should actually have based on their population relative to the bigger states.

[sgnelson]

as someone else posted, about halfway down here is a good explanation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/1...

But I would even go further; as to the house specifically and not the election of the president, you have inner state politics affecting the house and the distracting process. ie. Gerrymandering.

In my opinion, we are not seeing red states and blue states (or purple state), we have urban/suburban/rural interests all competing for resources. Keep in mind, now a days, we typically relate urban with democrats and suburban/rural with republicans, but this is not always the case, and sometimes a bit too simplistic.

In a state like North Carolina for instance, the state legislature is run by the republican party, which has the power on how each US house seat is redistricted. I would argue that NC rural interests have much more power than NC urban interests at the state legislature level. This then also gets mirrored in the US Congressional redistricting, where the US Congressmen for cities like Charlotte are geographically divided to give Charlotte as little Congressional power as possible. (For instance, the Congressman for the NC 9th district was in fact essentially the Congressman for just South Charlotte and a few outlying suburbs, his seat has been spread out to a small part of South Charlotte and 3 or 4 very rural counties. This means that he can no longer solely lobby for South Charlotte's interests, but now has a "split" constituency (suburban vs. rural with different needs/wants. Think of it as a majority minority style district for rural areas). I would argue that this means that Charlotte's interests are in part superseded by small rural county interests, which once again, (unfairly?) gives more political power to lower density areas than larger density areas.

(Keep in mind, the above is all my own opinions and arguments, in currently lacking in hard evidence (such as the NC legislature intentionally split the 9th district to deny power to Charlotte) and relies on a few assumptions. So take it with a grain of salt, though I stand by my analysis.)

TL;DR; Even in states with a somewhat equal rural/urban divde, some states give more power to rural areas than urban areas by gerrymandering.

[gweinberg]

They're even with a rounding error, but every state must get at least one. The rounding error is pretty big for the smallest states.