another electoral college point before i go do real work: it doesn’t actually give an advantage to small states or rural states, it gives an advantage to closely competitive states regardless of size or urban/rural composition.
if you actually wanted small state voters to have an outsized place, you would want a national popular vote, since a marginal vote in say, alabama, would be much cheaper to win than a marginal vote in california.
and i’m pretty sure that’s what would happen: candidates would campaign for the cheapest votes, which would mean maximizing their gains in small and medium-sized states where advertising is inexpensive and a large partisan advantage obscures large pools of potential votes
i.e., how many votes could a democrat win in mississippi if every vote counted in the presidential election? probably more than the existing democratic presidential vote share, and for much lower cost than winning an additional vote in New York.
a real life example of how this looks is the 2008 democratic primary, which Obama won, in part, by maximizing his share of the vote in states that he lost.
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