538 article on Senate’s Rural Skew

[Orser67]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/

The Senate is an enormous problem for Democrats given the current political coalitions, in which Democrats are dominant in cities while Republicans triumph in rural areas...

Because there are a lot of largely rural, low-population states, the average state — which reflects the composition of the Senate — has 35 percent of its population in rural areas and only 14 percent in urban core areas, even though the country as a whole — including dense, high-population states like New York, Texas and California — has about 25 percent of the population in each group. That’s a pretty serious skew. It means that the Senate, de facto, has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation … even though there are actually about an equal number of voters in each bucket nationwide.

[Orser67]

Just want to point out that this article has a nice chart with data on each state's population density. It divides up the country into four categories:

Rural: Less than 25,000 people live within a 5-mile radius of you;
Exurban or small town: Between 25,000 and 100,000 people within a 5-mile radius;
Suburban or small city: Between 100,000 and 250,000 people within a 5-mile radius;
Urban core or large city: More than 250,000 people within a 5-mile radius.

Using these definitions, nationwide (including DC and Puerto Rico), about 25% of the population lives in rural areas, 23% in exurban/small town areas, 27% in suburban/small city areas, and 25% in large cities. Whereas the average state is 35% rural, 26% exurban/small town, 25% suburban, and 14% large city. There are 33 states where rural+small town is at least 50%; 27 states have <10% of the population in large cities, compared to 5 states with <10% of the population in rural areas. Also:

In the U.S. as a whole, 60 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white and 40 percent of the population is nonwhite. But in the average state, 68 percent of people are white and 32 percent are nonwhite. It’s almost as if the Senate has turned the clock back by 20 years as far as the racial demographics of the country goes.

It's widely known that the Senate overrepresents rural areas, but it's nice to see some actual data to better understand it. Essentially, the issue is that, while exurban and suburban areas are represented at rates roughly equal to their share of the population, rural areas are overrepresented at the expense of dense urban areas.