FiveThirtyEight's Ella Koeze did a piece last year on "How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College", with the intention being:
It turns out the answer is "no" but it definitely shows how arbitrary the US electoral college is and our "THIS IS RED THIS IS BLUE" views. So one is the State of Superior, proposed in 1897 for the top of Michigan, which means (if all the voters were the same) "Trump would have won Superior by a 21-point margin, leaving Michigan’s lower peninsula to be narrowly won by Clinton", changing how we talk about and view the place(s). And for Illinois, solidly blue state, definitely Democrat, if Chicago was its own state "the rest of Illinois then would have become a red-leaning swing state". The West Coat proposed states of Lincoln and Jefferson would be Republican in 2016 and kill the idea of the entire coast as pure blue.
As a general thought exercise, it's quite clever.
(This is also a good way to get AH states quickly)
One way to understand just how skewed the Electoral College can be is by rearranging the states inside of it. We know what would happen if the Electoral College were gone, but what would happen if it were simply different?
Our current state borders are fairly arbitrary. Throughout American history, people have been proposing new states, but most don’t appear on the map today, either because they once existed but were later redrawn, or because they simply never caught on. But what if some of these would-be states were around today? Would moving those state borders, without changing any votes, change our political reality?
It turns out the answer is "no" but it definitely shows how arbitrary the US electoral college is and our "THIS IS RED THIS IS BLUE" views. So one is the State of Superior, proposed in 1897 for the top of Michigan, which means (if all the voters were the same) "Trump would have won Superior by a 21-point margin, leaving Michigan’s lower peninsula to be narrowly won by Clinton", changing how we talk about and view the place(s). And for Illinois, solidly blue state, definitely Democrat, if Chicago was its own state "the rest of Illinois then would have become a red-leaning swing state". The West Coat proposed states of Lincoln and Jefferson would be Republican in 2016 and kill the idea of the entire coast as pure blue.
As a general thought exercise, it's quite clever.
(This is also a good way to get AH states quickly)