The thing is that there aren’t, really, middle-sizes states; by population, U.S. states are not distributed along a bell curve. You’ve basically got four groups:
California (34,000,000, more than 50% more than any other state)
The Three Other Election-Turners (Tx, NY, and FL)
The States With At Least One Really Big City But Still A Fraction of CA, Like Illinois or Arizona
The Really Small States, Like Arkansas
The Ridiculously Small States Without Even A Million People. Like Montana
Assuming the population of the USA is about 300,000,000, the average state should have about 6,000,000 people, but at least 32 out of 50 states do not have that many.
Er, isn’t #3 pretty much the “middle-sized” category? I’m not so much getting your point, here. Illinois and Pennsylvania have a bigger combined population than Texas; Ohio and Michigan have a bigger combined population than New York; Georgia and New Jersey have a bigger combined population than Florida. Just like North Carolina, they’re each in the 15-21 range of electoral votes.
The term “middle-sized” might just be a subjective thing. In the U.S., we judge the “size” of a state by how much it seems to have influcenced the culture and political system–that is to say, not too much and not too little. The numbers, as RickJay has cited them, may not necessarily reflect this. And people in New York and California can often be culturally myopic.
