Trump is president; Who is to blame?

[Crossless2.0]

That's true, but alpha male also has a point. There are a lot of people in consistently red or blue states who feel there is no reason to bother voting since their vote won't overcome historically wide margins that favor the party they oppose. Whether you are a conservative in Massachusetts or a liberal in Wyoming, the electoral college as we currently practice it is a strong disincentive to participate.

Not saying that it isn't...but there would be an even stringer disincentive for reds, particularly, if we made elections a matter of who could win the big cities.  Blues have been doing that...even in red states.  

Even if it was the end of retail politics and townhall meetings/debates, we could count on the media covering the major candidates and disseminating their talking points even if they never ventured out of the largest metropolitan areas.

If you thought you could count on that you must be thinking the way Hillary thought about it...and we see that it cost her the election, but only because of the electoral college as it currently applies...where trump only needed to tilt a few votes in town and crush, predictably, outside city limits.

And of course, if they restricted their active campaigning to those population centers, they would expose themselves to backlash from voters in the so-called fly-over areas who felt dismissed and ignored. One way or another, candidates are going to have to figure out ways to reach voters in every area and from all walks of life if the current EC system was eliminated or reformed.

But why would you need the smaller percentage of voters loosely spread out over a larger area if you could win it in the cities alone?

All good points. That's why I favor reforming the EC rather than going with a straight popular vote election. I'd rather see the contests in each state become more significant and worth fighting for than have a situation in which each candidate trained all of their fire on a relative handful of cities.