The electoral atleast limits the impact of highly populated states on an election.

The electorial college exists because tyranny of the majority ends badly. Especially when it gives a few bubbles in the country a lot of power.

It's not "elitism" when California is the 5th largest economy in the world on its own. If you subtracted that from the US on top of New York, the US would draistically be a shadow of itself in terms of global stature. The economic engines of the US are on the coastal cities, there's nothing "elite" about that, it's simply true. 

Things change, times change. Once upon a time in the US 50% of people also lived on farms and woke up everyone to walk around in pig crap and work on fields. That's why movie Westerns at one time were one of the largest TV and film genres (Gunsmoke, John Wanye movies). That doesn't exist any more, young people don't want to live on a farm or in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere, USA. 

Pretty soon most of the world's population will live in urban centers, not just the US but everywhere. 

"tyranny of the majority" lol... So basically, the majority of people can't choose their president, because there is a smaller group of people that doesn't want someone else to decide for them.

This is beyond stupidity, this is so much worse, and this is not what a democracy is supposed to be. My god the stupidity of all this is incredible.

lol no it doesnt. They call it the "blue wall" for a reason. 

Of course it's fair! The whole point was people in urban regions will vote differently from people in the countryside, but the countryside seems unable to hold the same amount of people. How do you give the people in the rural and sparsely populated flyover US the same weight and firepower as those in the cities? You destroy the boundary between both to ensure the urban population has less power. 

The reason Clinton had more votes was solely because of one state: California. Since Trump didn't even bother campaigning for the 55 electoral votes California packs, the state was lost in a mudslide and almost everyone decided to vote for the crook instead. In other words, the Hollywood celebrities pack the most electoral votes, but they pack far more people than this. 

It's not "elitism" when California is the 5th largest economy in the world on its own. If you subtracted that from the US on top of New York, the US would draistically be a shadow of itself in terms of global stature. The economic engines of the US are on the coastal cities, there's nothing "elite" about that, it's simply true. 

Things change, times change. Once upon a time in the US 50% of people also lived on farms and woke up everyone to walk around in pig crap and work on fields. That's why movie Westerns at one time were one of the largest TV and film genres (Gunsmoke, John Wanye movies). That doesn't exist any more, young people don't want to live on a farm or in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere, USA. 

Pretty soon most of the world's population will live in urban centers, not just the US but everywhere. 

To address this point made by both you guys, I don't think you quite understand how the math works here. Going by 2012 population estimates, the five largest metro areas in the U.S. (NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, and San Fran) do indeed account for a bit over 70 million people. But that is only about 22.5% of the population. While due to variations in things turnout and percentage of non-citizen population (non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections) the actual percentage of the electorate hailing from those five metro areas may be slightly more or less than 22.5%. But in any case, we're talking about less than a quarter of the population. I don't know how you can rationalize beliving so, but there is simply no way in hell any candidate can win by simply focusing on a few large metro areas and ignoring the rest of the population.

First off, those metro areas are not ideological/partisan monoliths. 16 of the 25 counties that are part of the NYC metro area voted for Trump. I haven't taken the time to add all 25 of those counties' votes up, but suffice it to say that there's a lot of Republicans in the suburbs and outlying areas. But let's say the Democrat averages two-thirds of the vote in the five biggest metro areas. Two-thirds of 22.5% is only 15%. There is absolutely zero chance a Democrat could win with only 15% of the electorate.

Even if you go to the top 40 metro areas, which total a bit over half the electorate, the most a candidate is likely to receive is about a third of the popular vote. And even if they got 60% of all voters not classified as rural, they're still not quite at the 50% mark. In a close election, the nearly 20% of the population that is rural could be a valuable demographic for the candidates to try to go after.

In a national popular vote system, every vote counts. A candidate cannot afford to neglect any part of the country. Small states would still matter. Rural voters would still matter. In fact, they'd matter even more. It's not like the current system where deep red and deep blue states are taken for granted, with Republicans in deep blue states and Democrats in deep red states effectively not counting for much of anything, and the candidates instead focusing on tipping maybe at most about 5-10% of the electorate in a dozen swing states. If the states' geographical areas were determined by how much attention they got in an election, here's what America would have looked like in 2012:

It wouldn't have looked much different in this past election.

The idea that a few big cites, or just California and New York, could tip the entire election simply doesn't hold water.

@Shadow. I'm just going to keep this as concisely, as possible.

Not to say you're wrong on voters in Wyoming and Vermont having 4x the voting power than those in Cali or Texas, but I would like to know how you came to that conclusion. A peer-reviewed study perhaps? Thanks. I think you make some good points. However, you have to take into account the different demographics of each state and those demographics are not equally distributed. A direct democracy will give certain minority opinions the shaft because the representation will not be there. You make good points on the protection of minority opinions from government oppression, but what about the outreach?

The thesis of your second paragraph is flawed in the implication that swing voters are monolithic. The swing voter can represent a variety of demographics and that plays an important role. The voters in the swing states tend to change in opinion more often than those in solid blue/red states which leads to my next point: the number of solid Democrat and solid Republican voters aren't equal. A direct democracy would work if distribution of Democrat, Republican, and unaffiliated voters were evenly distributed. However, such an ideal situation is impossible.

For your rebuttal on my third point, are you looking a population or voterbase? I'm asking this question because those two things are very different from each other. Also, there are significantly more than just five major cities in the US. You left out Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Portland, so forth and so forth. You make a good point on that urban voters aren't a monolith, but I think we can both agree that in general, urban voters tend to lean towards the left.

Anyways, I greatly appreciate your response. Thank you for approaching in a far more mature manner than... eh, I'll just leave it there

Here's a more concise version of your first paragraph

Sargon's Law - Whenever an ideologue makes a character judgement about someone they are debating with, that character judgement is usually true about themselves.