4 ms·

Except 83% of the USA population lives in urban areas. Parent comment is suggesting that any candidate would rationally only focus on urban areas, urban issues,

• zepto 6y ago
  Exactly - high population density areas would become the battlegrounds. Nobody outside a city would matter.
• wan23 6y ago
  In our first past the post voting system, the parties will gravitate to positions that roughly 50% of the people have. If there were two candidates that were both ignoring rural areas and were 50/50 with urbanites, it would be only rational for one to try to capture the remaining 17% of people who live in rural areas. That would make it so that the candidate who ignores the rural population would be a sure loser. The only thing that could happen then would be that the other party also fights for the rural vote or that they try to claim a larger share of the urban vote to make up for their disadvantage in rural communities. In either case, votes from the entire country would matter.
  • zepto 6y ago
    That doesn’t add up at all. How can both be at 50% with urban voters and yet only one of them ‘ignoring the rural vote’? Of course rural votes would have some effect at the margins, but the priorities of rural voters would always be a meaningless tie breaker, and never carry significant weight. Yes, votes across the whole country would matter, but rural votes would have so little leverage that they wouldn’t impact the agenda.