Hicks Nix Progressive Picks

Fifteen paragraphs (Too long? Don't, then.) one might read of a Sunday p.m. if one gave a flying fuck about anything
at all any more.

Gets several times the representation of any urbane sophisticate or rootless cosmoplitan reading this.

Per The Atlantic, empty acres voting are a problem all over your world of shit & pain. Indeed, over-representation of hicks, bumpkins, clodhoppers, crackers, hayseeds, yokels, peasants, sheep-shaggers, farmers & their ignorant inbred ilk is probably a significant contributor to this world being so shitty & painful.

Example:

[T]he structure of the electoral systems gives rural voters disproportionate power, relative to their numbers, over their more numerous urban-dwelling counterparts. And on certain issues, this can shift national priorities in favor of rural ones. In the United States in 2016, for example, the Republican platform called for eliminating federal funding for public transit, arguing that it “serves only a small portion of the population, concentrated in six big cities,” implying that Trump’s expected infrastructure bill could focus on highways rather than on urban transit networks. Global warming, of special concern to urban coastal voters, has been described essentially as intriguing speculation by the president-elect.

How sorry our country cousins will be when the swarthy rampaging hordes from the drowned cities come looking for lebensraum in the cow pastures & onion fields.

As usual, there is no real hope.

[D]emocracies like the United States that give rural voters extra power will face crises of legitimacy as national policy is determined by a political minority. “Politics is just a pitched battle between these two geographically based groups,” Rodden said.

[...]

Those frustrated with the Electoral College can take inspiration from Argentina, which succeeded in abolishing its own ahead of a 1995 national election, as part of a political compromise that allowed voter in Buenos Aires to be equally represented in elections for this one branch of government. (The legislature is another matter.) But such a compromise is almost impossible to imagine in today’s polarized Washington where the Republicans that now control the government have no incentive to tamper with a political system that benefits them. “If the frustration level gets ratcheted up I don’t know where we go. There’s either institutional reform or secession. Neither of those things happen easily given our constitution. That’s just the predicament that we’re in,” Rodden said.