Fair point, but it's easier to successfully campaign a low density region (i.e, a state with around 7M people like Washington) than a high density metro area (t

Fair point, but it's easier to successfully campaign a low density region (i.e, a state with around 7M people like Washington) than a high density metro area (the metro area where I live in has 6M people, so traffic is already a daily nightmare). Those campaigns in Washington and Minnesota just wouldn't fly here. When our metro population was around <=3M, people still zipper merged (in the mid 90s and earlier).