[acdha]

> California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter.

This is only true if you hyper focus on the President (and ignore Bush/Reagan/Ford/Nixon in CA, Clinton in MT, etc.) - those voices are heard in the House and Senate, which have key impacts on what a President can actually do.

It’s also omitting the question of why those states vote the way they do. California now votes for Democrats not because the Republican Party forgot to campaign but because they pushed Proposition 187 through and convinced multiple generations of Latino voters that the GOP hated them. It is very easy to imagine, say, a world where George W. Bush put the state back in play after being successful in the effort to get the party shift away from the anti-Latino positions - call it the Trump opposite-world. That’s a big incentive but not enough due to where those states have considerable voice: the primaries. California might not be in question for the general but it definitely delivers a lot of votes for the primary winner, which affects their positions.

[zerocrates]

This discussion is about the Electoral College, of course it's focused on the President.

[acdha]

Yes, my point was that it wasn’t true that voices in certain states are ignored even if they don’t directly produce EC votes. A Republican Presidential candidate isn’t going to ignore California and New York voters who still elect members of Congress they’ll need to work with, donate the increasingly large amounts of money needed to run, and whose presence in the primaries affects who’s going to make it far enough to care about the EC.