Land should vote. Most people are dumber than dirt.

This is a nice graphic. One of the persistent lie level irritations caused by conservatives is their pretence or misunderstanding that the amount of territory your votes cover doesn't matter.

The electoral college matters, of course, but it's not tied to extent of territory, either (although it's tied to territorial boundaries).

But, for example, these heavily red maps were popular in 2008 and 2012 in an attempt to diminish Barack Obama's elections by showing that "most" of the country went Republican. Of course it did no such thing. Nor did it in 2016, although that's how the electoral college votes worked out. Only people vote, not acreage, so - electoral college aside - although, for example, Wyoming is 17 1/2 times the Geographic size of Connecticut, Connecticut has about 6 1/2 times as many people. Even if we focus on electoral college votes, which are over-weighted for small population states, Connecticut counts for more than twice as much as Wyoming.

Here's a reality check for conservatives. The Republicans have lost the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 elections, and that 7th was a squeaker, only half a percentage point nationally. Granted, if the game was to get popular votes rather than electoral college votes, Republican candidates might play it differently. But so would the Democratic candidates, and I see no evidence Republicans would do better under a popular vote system. Their base of older, whiter, Christian, social conservatives is inexorably declining. They are at present a party desperately banking on institutions allowing for minority rule to maintain some grip on power.

And that's legitimate within the American institutional structure. But it hints of illegitimacy in the liberal democratic context, and ultimately even within the (small r) republican context (where minority dominance would be presumed to be of a sort of elite, rather than ant-elites who proudly accept the label "deplorable"). I think that is why conservatives emphasise these heavily red maps: they give the impression of a country that's mostly Republican, suggesting a greater legitimacy to Republicans' hold on power than the actual numbers of votes do.