Without the Electoral College, the sparsely populated states of the far west like North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada would become irrelevant in presidential politics. In 1992, Clinton carried Pennsylvania by over 400,000 votes, Illinois by over 700,000 and New York by almost 1,100,000. The total number of voters in these seven small states was less than Clinton's margins in Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois. It is not in the interest of the 200,000 extra voters in the Bronx, New York that they should be able to outvote the 200,000 cattle ranchers and miners in Wyoming. Cattle and minerals are just as important to the people who live in the Bronx as they are to people who live in Wyoming, even if they know nothing about how these issues effect them.
Geography counts in politics.
People should have paid more attention to Senators Ernest Greuning of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon when they cast the only no votes on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which provided the cover for American intervention in Vietnam. At the time, many people argued that if we didn't fight the communists in Vietnam, we would have to fight them in Hawaii. How the communists from a country of mostly peasant farmers would get to Hawaii was never mentioned. Anyway, if we were going to have to fight communists from the Pacific Ocean region, the people most threatened would have been those in Alaska and Oregon. Yet, their senators were voting no.