The United States currently has fifty States, of which, the physical square miles of each, varies considerably. For instance, in the continental United States, Texas is by far the biggest State in the union, so big in fact, that the thirteen smallest States combined would still be less in size than Texas. The foregoing might seem to be one of those little trivia questions which don't mean much of anything, until you recognize a couple of very important points. The first point is that our Congress, the legislative branch of our government, makes laws, to which that Congress has two parts of it, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The amount of members that each State sends to the House of Representatives is based on the State population, which is updated every ten years, although the amount of members in total that make up the House does not change. The Senate, on the other hand, has two members per each State, and this does not change ever. The second point, is that America has distinctive territories such as the West, South, Northeast, and Midwest, that often vote in concert with one another, so that any one section of the country that is more heavily represented, will have more influence than another section of the country, and by virtue of having more Senators in a given section, can and will definitely influence legislation.
The area of the country that has the seven smallest States of the union is the Northeast and those States are Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The other three States that make up the Northeastern quadrant are Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York, in which not even New York ranks in the top 25 of States in physical square miles in America. These ten States represent 20% of the Senate and have shown consistently over the last twenty-odd years that their mindset is quite similar, which is not surprising considering that only three of the twenty Senators from these States are Republican. In fact, over the last six Presidential elections (1992-2012), all ten States have voted Democratic each and every time, with the sole exception of New Hampshire in 2000. The fact that the Northeast has that type of consistency equates to it having an undue influence in the political field of the Senate, and should rightly be looked upon as the Northeastern bloc.
The upshot is that States such as Texas and California, while having huge populations and many members of Congress, are still significantly short-changed when it comes to their particular geographic area of the union mainly because their Senate presence is so anemic. In addition, large States with little population, such as Wyoming and Montana, are given much more of a say, even though there virtually isn't anyone that actually lives there. This doesn't mean that the Senate as structured is necessarily flawed, but what it does mean is that the fact that the Northeastern part of the union has all the small States gives them an undue influence over national politics simply because they were so fortunate as to have significantly smaller size colonial footprints that later became States.
The thing is that those that are in power, hate to relinquish power, which is probably a significant contributing factor as to why so many of the States created later, were much larger physically in size, so as to not diminish the power of the smaller States, by adding a bunch of competing small States, and thereby diluting the Senatorial power of the Northeast.