Well, there's a lot to follow through on for more essays. There's the education and economic systems that favored population in cities, extracting the brightest and most educated from the weaker small towns. There was the industrialization of agriculture that consolidated farms and support systems away from rural areas. There was the deregulation and anti-government rhetoric of Reaganism (and frankly, a lot of government workers who made government ineffective as a support system for working poor). Then the abandonment of rural white poor by Democrats who just didn't live there anymore.
The electoral college and Senate were meant (200+ years ago) to also represent the interests of the land itself (hopefully through the educated stewards of the land). Land grant colleges were supposed to be land-oriented (Michigan State is technically the Michigan State University of Agriculture and Industry: not 'Sportsball State'). Instead, most all have been co-opted by unfettered consumptionism, market manipulation and lind, fanatical competition: leading to the highest paid public employee in almost every state being a sportsball coach. Yes, the Republicans have succeeded in manipulating our areas, but the Democrats had a huge hand in it by their own selfish machinations and schemes in the name of popularity contests and bureaucratic obfuscation. Thanks to perpetual growth of programs and paperwork, they've always created more headaches than help. "Smartest guys in the room"? Not since Elizabeth Perkins.