“That way, no matter how large a vote the city turns in, it will only skew the votes for that district, not the entire state.”
Unfortunately, your analysis leaves out the fact that big cities a). have large numbers of congressional districts and b) it’s worse because until now, hopefully, the Census has counted “everyone” and those numbers have been used to craft Congressional Districts, and as a consequence, the large cities have even more Congressional Districts than their “legitimate populations” would suggest.
If Trump is able to get the “citizenship question” re-instituted, Los Angeles County ( as a prime example) will loose something like SIX CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS as a consequence
I understand, as well as the risk of gerrymanding, but it seems to me that the rural CDs would outnumber the city's. Probably depends upon the state. At the least, it would whittle down the amount of EC votes the metro area could deliver, instead of the whole hog. How many of California's 55 would be siphoned off by the conservative districts?