Meanwhile all those rural areas get overrepresentation in the US senate which is designed to represent acres, not people.

Let's just do away with Idaho, Utah, MT, ND SD WY and AK and make them one state. This frees up 12 whole senate seats. To better refelct America today, let's re-assign those senate seats to Chicago, SF, LA, Philly, BrooklynQueens, Detroit, DC, etc.

Then we could have like two gay senators and ten black and latino senators instead of all these right wing ultra conservative senators from palces that do't even deserve to be states in the first place, like Alaska or Wyoming. I mean, they just waited until there was enough whtie caucasions in those places till they could be states, say about 50,000 of them, meanwhile the minorities in the USA are locked out due to this archaic pro rural thing called the US Senate.

Or let's just dump states altogether and have 100 US Senators elected from 100 senate districts of roughly euqal population.

Then you'd see a party that stands for real change, year in and year out, and not just in total fuckup economic disaster years like this year. You'd have like 20 or 30 Senators who rae about as left wing as Bernie Sanders or Jesse Jackson or Jim McDermott or Ron Dellums.

Alaska has what 600000 people and gets 2 senators. wyoming, what about 500,000 people. But the rest of us, we have these huge cities inside "states" and the whole point is to take away power from urbanites.

So yes, once in a lifetime we win a big election. We would win every one if we had a system that was actually democratic and wasn't designed to represent acres, trees, plains and land. All of Alaska fits inside Seattle, population wise. All of Wyoming would fit inside Manhattan just on the west side between Columbus circle and what about 86th Street. The upper west side.

Urbanites who accept this accept their permanent disempowerment and as population of big cities increases and population of Wyoming and ND stays the same or gets smaller it just gets worse.

You think we won because we won the presidency. You will find we didn't because the Senate will stand in the way of everything Pres. Obama tries to pass.

Never. happen.

You mean "by," not "be," Savage.

Would somebody get Savage a proofreader?

Once again, Savage proves to be the least capable copy editor at the Stranger. Other posters proof their posts.

The twin cities are awash in blue and the rural, working-class iron range and most of northern MN is blue, but there's a solid band of red that rings the urban areas.

Same thing with Bellevue, Renton, Marysville, etc. You can't count on voters to swing blue simply because they live *near* a city.

People move to suburbs because they don't like city living, and they're not exactly going to be offended when the cities they don't care about are attacked as elite or aloof.

Which Dan interprets as, "Most Americans live in big cities..."

How 82 million out of 300 million gets him to "most" I'm not sure.

Dan, FYI, 82

I totally agree. Sanders this autumn with the prescriptions for the electorate (Pollzac, Palium, etc) became really annoying.

Crocker, though, is the worst.

I really do think education has a lot to do with it. Not so much education in and of itself, but basic critical thinking skills. Plenty of my grad school scientist friends are from the South or small towns, but none of them are Republican. Conversely, most of the kids I teach now in community college still believe Obama is a Muslim.

If you think through the issues and look at the facts, most of the "correct" answers fall on the Democratic side of the spectrum. Is there any compelling reason to deny marriage rights to gays, other than "The Bible tells me so"? Of course not. Is there any compelling reason not to do anything about climate change? No.

There are plenty of smart conservative people too, but I think most of them channel their energy into getting their people elected to power or writing their own moral code to impose on everybody.

They have to impose an archaic society on the new and free exurbs and agraria in order to survive by taxing the new to feed the old.