The fact that land gets more importance than people in our system is a big part of why Republicans have as much power as they have. We need to at least fully industrialize our system so that having a ton of land in an empty state doesn't give you the right to dictate national policy.
Sadly, this will require a Constitutional Convention, which will under our current Constitution gives even more power to these states.
Interestingly the article governing Constitutional Conventions is under Article 5. I really hope we don't have two of those at once. Things will get very confusing.
Conservative extremists are currently pushing for a Constitutional Convention, because they've gerrymandered enough/almost enough (depending on your particular opinion on "enough" in this radical scenario) state governments to allow them to recraft the Constitution as they'd prefer it to be.