Bro. Really? The electoral college does exactly what you just described. It serves to allow a Populist to focus on areas where votes are worth more proportionally and win the presidency without a majority. So it obviously was not designed to prevent that.

in fact:

The electoral college existed before the "coastal cities" was a thing where founders thought liberals needed some sort of check to appeals to "middle America" which did not even exist when the United States was born. In Fact 90% of the Country at the time were coastal states.

The entire point of the electoral college was a fig leaf to southern states to join the union, allowing them to have representation which included a vote worth 3/5 for each slave a southern plantation owner had. At the time, this was a reasonable compromise by the founders.

They probably expected slavery to die off within a couple decades, as they wrote in to the constitution an end date to the Slave Trade in the United States. Many empires and nations around the world were already putting an end to slave trade and slavery. They probably thought by the end of slavery, plantation owners would go back to being minority voters because without slaves, and blacks not being landowners, the voting bloc in the South would be very marginal. However, for almost a hundred years later for economic and political benefit, the south refused to abolish slavery in their own. In fact the founder's inadvertently built a system in to the constitution that encouraged slave owners to hold slaves if for no other reason than to have the voting benefits.

Tldr; the notion of EC existing to prevent populist leader is a myth