Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Yeah, in practice, both votes are useless because neither state is competitive. But the WY electoral votes still count towards the total far more than the CA electoral votes.
Wyoming has around 500k residents and 3 electoral votes. CA has around 37 million residents and 55 electoral votes. So a vote in WY is around 5-6 times as valuable as a vote in CA.
If the electoral college were exactly representative of population differences between the states, that would be one thing, but it isn't. The electoral college strongly favors voters lightly populated states.
I don't even know if this would have changed the election, as there are big states that went Trump (TX, FL) and little states that went Clinton (VT, HI). But the small state voters clearly have far more valuable votes.
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Trump still would've won regardless. Seven of the top 10 most populous states went to Trump (TX, FL, PA, OH, MI, GA, NC). The states that Trump won have about 56.4% of the US population and 56.9% of the electoral college points. The key is that a lot of the swing states went to Trump. I think he did less well in a lot of the classic red states compared to previous GOP candidates, states like GA, SC and TX, but not by enough to lose any of them, while gaining enough support in the midwest/rust belt states to flip most of them.