I was kindly invited to speak on the Plain Talk podcast with Rob Port in North Dakota. Here’s what I tried to communicate:
The 216,000 North Dakotans who voted for Donald Trump got three electors in the Electoral College, but only 174,000 Trump voters in Wyoming got the same number, and only 163,000 in Alaska got the same number. What's fair about not giving every vote in every state equal weight? The only way to do that is to count every vote in every state equally in a national contest for the presidency.
There are according to various sources at least 583,000 eligible voters in North Dakota. Of course it is a Republican leaning state, but only 216,000, or 37%, voted for Donald Trump. Why? Because his campaign took the state's outcome for granted, and not every vote cast there mattered. This is how the electoral college system does not bring North Dakotans into full participation in the single national election. The result is that your citizens get less attention paid not only in the general election but generally in politics than they deserve. This is why, for instance, the tariff war doesn't help you, why the focus on manufacturing in Ohio does nothing for you, and so on.
There are 60 million Americans in rural areas. By and large they are ignored relative to the residents of a handful of swing states, even though their concerns and issues are quite distinct. The reason is that almost all live in states that are taken for granted by the presidential nominees.
According to Wikipedia, presidential visits to North Dakota are few and far between—only seven visits since Nixon—if you want to take that as evidence of being taken for granted. By contrast, Barack Obama and Donald Trump alone have visited New Hampshire (a state with only one more electoral vote than North Dakota) seven times as presidents.