The Founding Fathers and the rural voter

Tomas McIntee
7 min readJul 16, 2018
(Remixed from source and source.)

If you are reading this, you probably have heard someone say that the Founding Fathers designed the structure of the federal government to protect the interests of rural voters.

This is false.

The Founding Fathers weren’t trying to protect the interests of rural voters. They had other concerns, which are well documented, but there is no provision of the United States Constitution that was intended to help protect the interests of rural voters. The closest that we can come are the clauses intended to protect slavery — and those are obsolete.

The Founding Fathers did not intend to protect the interests of rural voters. They considered the idea of disenfranchising urban voters once during the Constitutional Convention, but dismissed it resoundingly. Rural voters are over-represented in the Senate, but this is accidental.

The entire country was rural — including large states

When the Constitution was written, nearly the entire population of the country was rural. In Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia combined, there were four towns with a population of more than 2500 as of the 1790 census — all in Virginia, adding up to 1.5% of Virginia’s population. Virginia was the most populous state by a large margin.

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Tomas McIntee
Tomas McIntee

Written by Tomas McIntee

Dr. Tomas McIntee is a mathematician and occasional social scientist with stray degrees in physics and philosophy.

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