In 1920, for the first time, the Census Bureau counted more people living in urbanized America than in the countryside. This hasn’t been a rural nation ever since.

Yet the idea of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian America has receded slowly despite demographic change. We still romanticize the family farm, though relatively few of them exist anymore. We view even suburbia in pastoral terms — the “crabgrass frontier,” as the historian Kenneth T. Jackson put it. And, as the recent Electoral College results make clear, we still live with political institutions that have baked in a distinctly pro-rural bias, by design.

The Democratic candidate for president has now won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. But in part because the system empowers rural states, for the second time in that span, the candidate who garnered the most votes will not be president.

Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage.