Land doesn’t vote, people do. Your argument justifies federalism, not unequal voting power.

The US is a republic of states, not a democracy. We vote by electoral college, and not directly by the population, for a reason. The electoral college is weighted using both the House (population-weighted representation) and Senate (equal state representation) so the small states don't get ignored and controlled by the large states.

States are artificial, national elections should be ranked choice, or at worst simple majority vote.

Electoral college was a sop to slavers and should be deleted. It doesn't empower small states, it empowers large states which happen to be swing states.

On the other hand, if power in the US was as centralized at the time as you seem to suggest it should be, federal marshals would have simply enforced the escaped slaves act over abolitionist state's protests.

Returning escaped slaves was in the constitution itself (fugitive slave clause).

Founders’ intent is pretty irrelevant to today’s problems. They ran forced labor plantations, hadn’t mastered electricity or germ theory of disease, and the biggest city was ~30K people.

1 person = 1 vote, get rid of all the rural planter rigs.

"States" are a fiction. There are only people. So to translate what you wrote into on-the-ground reality: the senate exists to make sure that the people who live in states with small populations are not subject to the will of the majority of people in the country.

This is defensible, and I'm sure you would not balk at being called "anti-majoritarian", but lets be clear about what is going on.

Also, post-Civil War, this "we're a republic not a democracy" stuff really changed significantly. While it may have been absolutely true in 1776, it became much less true in the 1800s, and has continued to become even less so in the 1900s. It may have been better if the Constitution had been amended to reflect this (since it was happening anyway), but it's burying your head in the sand to pretend that the original conception is reality on the ground today.

We have state governments and different laws across states, and people move between states in part because of the effects those laws have on their lives. It is still very much a reality.

What we have is a heirarchy of laws, ranging from constitutional to federal to state to county to local. I think this is a great idea. But it doesn't mean that we're "just" a republic of states.

The disconnect here is that to many of us, it seems 100% rational that the majority of people (whether popular or representative) should pick the president. Not because of who people in cities tend to vote for, but because it makes no logical sense to allocate so much influence to so few people.

The universe doesn't owe unpopular ideas equal footing. People who don't like what cities think might feel like the odds are stacked against them in a popular contest. They are correct.

We don't give new chess players extra queens, either.

One person should = one vote, absurd that Wyoming gets 70× the Senate influence with the population of Modesto.