I'm sure rural Americans having essentially no representation on the Federal level would be quite ok for you, but not for them. You do understand that this is what the Senate and EC were supposed to address, correct?
Not really, no.
At that time
all of the nascent states were essentially rural. There were only a handful of "cities", and their influence was focussed mostly as economic centers of activity, not as centers of population.
It wasn't' anything "rural" which the EC and Senate were meant to address, and it didn't have much to do with size for that matter. It was for states which were were small in
population. The Wyomings and Dakotas of today didn't exist yet. It was the New Hampshires and Rhode Islands that were concerned about equal representation.
Sure, they were "rural", but so was nearly
everyone else for all practical purposes. How rural? The reason Tuesday was chosen as the day for national elections was because so many voters needed a day to travel to the polls by horse and buggy, and they didn't want to have to do that on a Sunday, the Sabbath.
What they were, more significantly, was underpopulated.
Where this actually became most involved wasn't about the Senate, but about the way populations were counted for the
proportional House of Representatives.
If taxes from the states to the Fed were based on straight population, then the Southern slave states would have to pay taxes based on non-voting "property".
They didn't like that idea.
If the number of members of the House of Representatives allocated to a given state was based on the number of people and not the number of "citizens" then the Northern non-slave states would lose representation to states with a large population which had no civil rights and weren't allowed to vote for those Representatives.
They didn't like
that idea.
Tough luck for them. The Three Fifths Compromise, which cut that baby into two pieces, still gave the Southern States a lock on the Electoral College which wasn't really broken to any significant degree until after the Civil War and the 13th and 14th Amendments.
Even if that hadn't happened they still would have had voting representation in the House far in excess of those small states, just not as much. Not enough to overwhelm the non-slave states the way they ended up doing for decades.
"Rural" really didn't have much to do with it. At the time "rural" was not a synonym for "underpopulated". It was just the way nearly everyone lived.
This didn't really change all that much until the close of the 19th century. As late as 1900 60% of the U.S was
still considered to live in "rural" areas. 40% lived on farms.
The rural/urban dichotomy you describe is a comparatively recent political issue. It wasn't anything the Founding Fathers lost much sleep over.
