It is election season once again, which means that, regardless of who wins and loses, everyone will be forced to listen to more complaining about the mythical “popular vote.”
The national “popular vote” is the total count of individual votes for each presidential candidate, added up from all 50 states. Many sore losers blame it first after a presidential election loss. After 2016, you may recall many “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote” complaints from Democrats, which are always followed closely by cries to eliminate the Electoral College.
As the Democratic Party exiles itself to urban areas, the party has increased its chance of running up individual vote totals in large Democratic cities while doing nothing to increase its chances of reliable electoral votes in swing states that don’t have a Los Angeles or New York City in which to run up the score. Enter the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the dubiously constitutional plan to undermine the electoral system that would make elections less safe and, believe it or not, even more partisan than they already are.
The compact consists of states voting to tie their electoral votes to the national popular vote total, meaning each state would award its electoral votes to the candidate with the most votes in the country, even if that candidate loses in those states. As of now, 17 states and the District of Columbia have tied their 209 electoral votes to the national popular vote, getting closer to the 270 electoral votes needed for a candidate to become president.
In theory, this plan contradicts what the United States is supposed to be. It is the “United States” of America, after all. The states make up the country — the country that does not get to treat the states as smaller subservient departments. The loss of this concept among the general public is why the federal government has become more intrusive in everyday life, as voters and the parties, especially the Democratic Party, expect the president to absorb responsibilities that should fall to state governments.
This is the long way of saying that the national popular vote is a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist. The system functions precisely because it forces presidential candidates to make appeals to broad swaths of the country. You need to convince voters in Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia, states with unique cultures and issues, to become president. If you think the “rile up the base” strategy both Democrats and Republicans have embraced is bad now, imagine a national popular vote election that frees them from the shackles of “swing states” and encourages them to make juicing the base the only electoral priority.
In concept, the popular vote compact also manages to be an overtly partisan solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Thus far, only Democratic-controlled states and Washington, D.C., have signed on to it. This stems from Democratic opinions about the 2000 election that Al Gore should have been the winner because he “won the popular vote,” with the 2016 election reviving that sentiment after Hillary Clinton “won the popular vote” but not the presidency.
That 2016 election happens to be a perfect representation of how Democrats view the electoral system. Clinton’s campaign ran up the vote totals in big liberal cities. In fact, her nearly 2.9 million-“popular vote” lead can be chalked up just to California, driven by her 1.7 million margin in Los Angeles County. Clinton was very popular in small pockets of the country where Democratic voters congregate, so both she and the Democratic Party think she shouldn’t have to waste her time trying to win over voters in the middle of the country. She didn’t visit the swing state of Wisconsin once after the Democratic National Convention.
Democrats feel that they are so popular based on a popular vote metric that doesn’t mean anything in our current system that the system should be changed to their advantage. It is the same logic behind the Democratic push for statehood for Washington, D.C., which would gift the Democratic Party two senators because Democrats don’t want to have to campaign in multiple states in the middle of the country to get power in the legislature.
It should also be noted that the compact does not require states to abide by it until enough states join to reach 270 electoral votes. It’s just another wrinkle Democrats added to ensure that they don’t accidentally award a Republican presidential candidate the White House in a scenario in which the GOP wins the “popular vote” but Democrats win the Electoral College, a notable possibility in November.
So the popular vote compact fails in principle with what the U.S. is meant to be and fails in concept as a “solution” to an imagined problem given that it is nothing more than a Democratic power grab. Just as damning, though, is that the national popular vote would fail in practice by making elections more prone to widespread fraud and fuel rampant distrust in elections among the general public.
Yes, if you thought former President Donald Trump’s election conspiracy theories were bad in 2020, just wait until you see how many people would reasonably believe them under a popular vote system. A national popular vote would encourage political actors in both parties to engage in all kinds of chicanery, including voter fraud and voter suppression because the goal would simply be to have more votes total than the other team.
While Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud are obviously false, there is voter fraud that pops up in competitive races, most notably the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota. That race secured the Democratic Party the filibuster-proof Senate majority that gave us the Affordable Care Act. The incentive to cheat in a presidential election decided only by raw vote totals rather than electoral votes would lead to far more frequent fraud cases on a much larger scale.
This isn’t even a hypothetical, given that Democrats in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois all tried to remove Trump from their ballots. That would all but guarantee a Democratic win in the “popular vote,” resulting in a tit-for-tat in which each state only ends up with one presidential candidate on the ballot depending on what party runs the state.
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Even if you disregard that, the national popular vote system would fuel far greater distrust in election results. Picture the 2016 election, with Trump leading by some 2 million votes the day after the election, only for California’s glacial vote count to chip away at that lead for over a month. It wouldn’t be until December that all the votes would be counted in California, giving far more credence to the accusations that Democrats would be “finding” votes to make up the total than Trump’s supporters alleging that the overnight mail-in count in 2020 was a similar election ploy.
The national popular vote compact is lazy, destructive, ill-thought-out, blatantly partisan, and a defiance of the principles that make up America’s federal system. In that way, it is the perfect Democratic policy. As a means of choosing American presidents, though, it would manage to make every aspect of campaigns, governance, institutional trust, and the balance of power between states and the federal government worse. Given that both parties claim their last presidential loss only happened because the race was “stolen” from them, this “solution” couldn’t come at a worse time.