Totaling the 2016 numbers, Sam Wang, a molecular biologist at Princeton who also runs a widely read election website, found that out of almost 400 campaign stops made after the conventions, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump made appearances in Arkansas, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia or Vermont. It doesn’t matter that Trump won millions of votes in New Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. If your state is reliably red or blue, you are ignored.

By contrast, under a national popular vote, the margin of your loss within a state matters as much as the size of your win. Democrats would have reason to maximize their share of the vote in the Deep South, and Republicans would see the same incentive in the Northeast (and the West for that matter).

Still, you might argue, the Electoral College keeps large states from dominating small ones. If there were no such system, campaigns could win by focusing all their attention on the largest states. As a matter of math, that is unlikely. In 2016, New York, California, Texas and Florida cast about 35 million ballots, roughly a quarter of the total 137 million. Even if you somehow won every single one of those ballots, you’d still have to campaign elsewhere for tens of millions more votes, assuming a 50 percent threshold. Take the total of 2016 presidential votes in the 10 largest states, and you’d get only 71 million ballots, or about 52 percent of the vote.

In the incredible event that a candidate won every ballot cast in those states, then yes, under a national popular vote, he or she could ignore the rest of the country and become president. But that isn’t politically possible. Even an attempt to “run up the score” and retreat to the largest cities isn’t viable — there just aren’t enough votes.

Compare that with what we have under the Electoral College, where hypothetically a bare majority in the 11 largest states is all it takes to win 270 electors and become president — an actual instance of big-state domination .

Beyond the numbers, it is a conceptual error to focus on states in a race for votes. Who wins Virginia has implications for down-ballot races for Congress, but it’s just a curiosity in the fight for the White House. What would count are voters and communities, and candidates would have multiple avenues for building majority coalitions across state lines.

This gets to a larger point. As James Madison observed during the Constitutional Convention, the political interests of the states aren’t actually tied to size. Instead, whether states share interests will depend on shared conditions and connections. Massachusetts and Tennessee have populations of similar size but little in common otherwise; Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the other hand, are linked by history and geography.