the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.
I agree wholeheartedly about the problem. But blind highest count vote on every topic is one of the big dividers between rural and urban folks.
Rural folks will simply never have the numbers to influence outcomes in a pure vote count scenario. They're aware of this, and it leads to animosity.
Incidentally, I agree that financial decoupling would be ruinous for both, as well.
The real solution is represtational seats that give everyone a voice - no matter how the voting zone is divided.
I suspect that requires doing away with first-past-the-poll. The winner of that race will almost always be a city person, by raw numeric chance. That's fine, city folks have some good ideas. The problem is when there's no rural voice at the negotiation, at all.
And I think any sensible person realizes we also have to put a stop to all gerrymandering.
Also, we need to give seats to what remains of all of the first nations, while we're at it.
The little squiggles are necessary to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich.
I'm joking. (Mostly)
The squiggles are probably county line divisions, and probably simply the smallest existing land divisions with good population data available to make the map from.
I say "mostly joking" because existing county line divisions are already weird in some cases, to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich. So there's an unpleasant grain of truth in my joke.