No it isn ' t . By too heavily influenced , you mean that rural counties sometimes , on occasion , win elections . They wouldn ' t if it was a straight party line vote , and cities are important the rural candidate cannot ignore the urban areas but an urban candidate can ignore the rural areas , and in the form of Obama who I like , even if I disagree did just that . Not really , I think Trump is perhaps the epitome of a ' rural ' candidate . I think you ' d be hard pressed to describe policies of his that are intended to help urban areas , or appeal to urban voters and many of his policies explicitly harm them . Whereas many of his policies and even his persona is tailored to appeal to rural voters . And he was elected , despite record breaking urban support for Clinton . Urban voters , and the majority , were ignored because the electoral system we have overweights rural votes . I kind of think that ridding the country of the electoral vote would require a constitutional amendment , which would be difficult to pass with a plurality of states , unless there was some other kind of population adjustment mechanism in place . Officially , yes , but I ' d read up on the NPVIC if I were you . Because electors are chosen by the states , and the Federal government stays out of that process , if states pass laws forcing them to follow the national popular vote instead of their state vote , there isn ' t anything to be done at the federal level . And you need as few as 11 states but that would include Florida , North Carolina , Texas , Georgia , and Ohio , which is unlikely to happen to agree to those terms to set that law in action . I ' d like to see something done about the electoral college , simply because it IS undemocratic , but as a conservative it is , at the moment , the most significant bulwark against policies that I consider to be dangerous . I ' d support a reform of the electoral college that also included some kind of solution against gerrymandering and which made headway against the FPTP voting system . Saying ' the system is bad but it protects my views ' is a really , really slippery slope , its not hard to see how that view can get you to support all kinds of very bad systems . That said , I agree that the electoral college and our voting system needs rework . In regard to gerrymandering , its really easy to characterize the electoral college itself as a gerrymander . If we continued to expand the electoral college in the way the founding fathers had intended , we would have over 6000 people in the house , and instead of fivethirtyeight . com , you ' d be looking at s i x t h o usandfourhundredandeighty . com and 3241 to win . If such an apportionment was created , then California would have 778 electors 776 reps and 2 senators , and New York would have 402 . In fact , under such a systemState Electors TotalCA 778 778 NY 402 1180 WA 142 1322 NJ 180 1502 OR 82 1584 CO 109 1693 NM 43 1736 MN 111 1847 IL 259 2106 HI 30 2136 VA 168 2304 MD 121 2425 DE 21 2446 CT 73 2519 MA 136 2655 RI 23 2678 VT 15 2693 NH 29 2722 ME 29 2751 NV 59 2810 DC 15 2825 Still not enough to win , but PA ~ 250 MI ~ 220 would be enough to win . FWIW this shows that the states are a form of gerrymandering . Even if each vote was equally weighted or at least enough that the senate doesn ' t really matter , then you still have the winner not match the popular vote .