[ExI] My prediction

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 7:41 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> California has 18 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but California has 67.3 times as many people as Wyoming. And both states get exactly the same number of senators. I have asked the following question before but I have never gotten a straight answer:
>
> If Wyoming was as liberal as Massachusetts and California was as conservative as Mississippi, would you still be defending the electoral college and the way the number of senators are assigned to each state with such vigor?

While I am not defending the status quo, I can give you a straight
answer to this one.

Small-population, large-geography states are inherently conservative.
It's the rural vs. urban divide.  The hypothetical of California
becoming as conservative as Mississippi would require California to
lose a lot of its population, and thus a lot of its electoral votes.
Most of those who defend the higher per-capita electoral power of
small-population states are well aware that what they are actually
defending is just more electoral power for conservative voters.

Many of them appear to believe that they have no reason to admit it.
Many of those appear to believe that admitting to inconvenient facts
is a form of weakness, and have trouble grasping how one could
possibly draw strength from addressing such facts in public in the
manner that you and I do.  Quite often, when confronted with such a
concept they immediately leap to strawman parodies such as "but that
means you must ALWAYS and ONLY EVER state what's wrong with your point
of view", which is of course blatantly incorrect but they are often
unable to comprehend that it is not even remotely true.  I don't know
if it's an emotional reaction, but that would explain why they often
resort to trying to shout down, bombard with logical fallacies, and
otherwise do anything but actually rationally consider the concept.