As Democrats approach America’s 250th birthday on July 4, their efforts to wreck the foundation of our republic’s spectacular success are numerous. I’ll get to one of them with an anecdote.
In a pretty harbor town in Maine in 2024, a campaign volunteer pressed me to support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that would commit states to give their Electoral College votes to the candidate who won the popular vote for president, even if the state’s voters chose the other guy.
Coastal Mainers are generally Democrats — Republican voters tend to live inland — so the campaign volunteer probably assumed I was on the Left. She did not like my response, for I asked her whether, if Maine voted Democrat, she’d be OK giving the state’s votes to Trump if he won the popular vote. She opened and closed her mouth silently like a goldfish, then sourly answered, “I don’t think that’d happen.”
She was probably thinking of 2016 when Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 2.9 million votes nationally. But she beat him by 4.2 million in California alone. The math is that she lost to him by 1.3 million votes outside California. That’s where the interstate pact has its dubious appeal; it would allow concentrations of votes to dominate, and the biggest concentrations are in the big cities of blue states.
The campaigner’s response was telling because it focused on what she assumed would happen — on the outcome, not the process. Her answer emphasized, if emphasis was necessary, that supporters of the pact are not really taking a stand on principle for popular democracy, they’re just trying to snatch an advantage.
She also revealed the limits of her memory, which appeared to extend only as far back as 2016. In 2004, President George W. Bush won the popular vote after losing it in 2000. It could happen again. It did. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won it in 2024 just months after my confrontation in Maine. If the pact had been operational in 2024, Trump would have won 520 Electoral College votes, not 312, and almost all the states, not just 30 to 20. Would that have reflected the popular will? Not exactly!
The point is making sure small states are not swamped but have a say. It is precisely what the founders intended. The Electoral College is in the Constitution to force aspirants for the presidency to win broad support. That means making compromises rather than being radical and winning only 50% plus one vote. It makes sure the United States can be led by a radical only if that’s what the nation broadly wants.
But the Democratic Party wants radicalism irrespective of what the nation wants. It is impatient with the nation’s lack of radical rigor and disdainful of disagreement. It has lurched far left in the past generation and is now toppling yet further in the same direction. So it wants to demolish structures and processes that have ensured the public as a united people can choose how they are governed — that is what it means to be a free people, unthreatened by “overbearing majorities.”
While most of the nation will celebrate the Constitution as July 4 approaches, Democrats regard the document as an irritating impediment. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has now signed on to the National Popular Vote pact, shortly after ramming through a dishonest referendum. The latter violated the Virginia Constitution to gerrymander congressional seats, handing Democrats 10 and Republicans only one. It will probably be thrown out by the state supreme court, but the point is that Spanberger and the Democrats do not revere either U.S. Constitution or their state constitution, the foundational documents of their own authority. They reject the central genius of the American republic, which is to accept the proper process even if it produces a different result from what they want.
The U.S. Supreme Court would also almost certainly throw out the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact if it came before the bench, for it seeks to change the Constitution by unconstitutional means. The right way to change the Constitution is through an amendment, but Democrats know they wouldn’t get sufficient support to do that. So they try to get around it. Again, they focus only on results not on how they get it — the signature modus operandi of autocratic government.
Given that Democrats want the pact only for the assumed result of achieving power, and given that they probably know it is unconstitutional, one can assume that a Democrat state governor would challenge the pact in court if it transferred blue votes to a Republican. For the Left, ethics and democracy are contingent on circumstances.
Just as it is in Democrat campaigns to pack the Supreme Court with leftist justices so their radical agenda is given free rein beyond the scope of the Constitution. Just as it is also with their determination to give the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico statehood, to get four more senators, and to click the lock in perpetual power.
They do not realize or do not care that it is precisely because the Constitution of the nation, and the constitutions of states, have prevented these kinds of abuses that the public has remained free, and their method of government has, largely unchanged, conferred spectacular success on the U.S. for a quarter of a millennium.