Many state division and secessionist movements are afoot, including one that I had previously not known about, "New Illinois," which would be Illinois minus Chicagoland. See the WSJ's coverage here: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/rural-counties-new-illinois-california-1e1badb5?mod=djem10point
If you look at a map of any recent presidential election, you will see a sea of Republican red with splotches of Democrat blue. The Red areas also mostly rural areas and the blue ones mostly big cities and their burbs, with some Indian Reservations tossed into the mix.
The Founders and Framers devised the Electoral College (EC) to ensure that presidents would be chosen with input from states and not just majority rule because the president is supposed to represent the nation and not just densely populated areas. Democrats hate it for that reason and are actively trying to undermine it at the national level.
What true small-d democrats should be doing though, is replicating the EC at the state level so that big cities do not dominate rural areas, as they do in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and other states where blue metro areas control state government. They need to find some way for rural residents to have more say in policy, at least enough to veto policies that actively hurt them for no good reason.
One problem with straight majority rule is that only one voting precinct needs to be corrupted to throw a close election to the wrong party. Another problem is that if even a real majority lives in a small space or is otherwise narrowly interested in a subject, it can impose its palpably poor policies at low or no cost to themselves on people living in places the majority knows nothing about.
Consider, for example, the silly prohibition on trapping beavers in Massachusetts. People in Boston passed that because they think beavers are cute. They are, I guess, but they build dams that can damage people's property, not in "the Blue Blood streets of Boston" but in the Berkshires, hours away. The dumbest thing of all about the law is that people can still call exterminators to take out the beavers and hence have an incentive to ERADICATE the busy furry fellows so they do not have pay the exterminator fee again. If they could trap the beavers, they actually have an incentive to cull them rationally because beaver furs have some value. For more backup on this, see https://www.scirp.org/journal/papercitationdetails?paperid=124716&JournalID=192 (no paywall).
As our governments grow ever bigger and more powerful, incentives to break away from ones that do not represent all people will grow. If urban centers do not relinquish their death grip on rural areas by building something like state-level ECs, we may end up with 100 states, or maybe with two national governments, a democratic one that respects minority rights, and a Democratic one that does not.
For more on that, see another open source article I recently published here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44282-024-00065-5
Unconstrained democracy has been compared to two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner. The sheep needs a veto and so do our rural residents.
