Sources
Tell your state reps you want them to join the NPVIC! https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Riccardi, Nicholas. Farewell to the electoral college? Democrats now control enough states to elevate the popular vote. PBS. November 10, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/farewell-to-the-electoral-college-democrats-now-control-enough-states-to-elevate-the-popular-vote
Pingel, Anna and Caleb Burdett. Bill Analysis: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. America First Policy Institute. September 1, 2026. https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/bill-analysis-the-national-popular-vote-interstate-compact/
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Ballotpedia. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://ballotpedia.org/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact#History_and_background
Midterm Election Results in 5 States Provide Way for National Popular Vote to Reach 270 During 2027. National Popular Vote. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/midterm-election-results-5-states-provide-way-national-popular-vote-reach-270-during-2027
Tally of the 1824 Electoral College Vote. National Archives. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/electoral-tally
Elving, Ron. The Florida Recount Of 2000: A Nightmare That Goes On Haunting. NPR. November 12, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812854/the-florida-recount-of-2000-a-nightmare-that-goes-on-haunting
Chemerinsky, Erwin. Bush v. Gore in retrospect. SCOTUSblog. December 16, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/12/bush-v-gore-in-retrospect/
Hanging chad. Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/topic/hanging-chad
Kiley, Jocelyn. Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College. Pew Research Center. September 25, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/25/majority-of-americans-continue-to-favor-moving-away-from-electoral-college/
How is each state represented in the Electoral College? USA Facts. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/electoral-college-states-representation/
Population vs. Electoral Votes. Fair Vote. Accessed November 11, 2026. https://fairvote.org/archives/the_electoral_college-population_vs_electoral_votes/
Transcript
Imagine the current hair's breadth distance between the two candidates for the Senate in Mississippi weren't just deciding the outcome of a single senate seat but instead the outcome of an entire presidential election. That's what happened in November, 2000, when the entire nation waited with bated breath for WEEKS to find out which candidate, George W Bush or Al Gore, had won the state of florida. The election was close, but Al Gore had won the popular vote handily by over half a million votes. The electoral college, however, was too close to call, and it would be Florida whose electors would ultimately determine which candidate won a majority in the electoral college and, consequentially, the presidency of the United States. On election night, November 7, 2000, the networks all called the race for Gore. But Bush operatives called Fox news and said Florida was still too close to call. The secretary of state for Florida, Katherine Harris, was a close ally of Florida governor Jeb Bush, the brother of George W, and it was her job to certify the election results in Florida. On the day after the election, Harris called Florida for George Bush, handing him the presidency. Al Gore called Bush to congratulate him on his victory. Then, as votes continued to be tallied, it became clear that the margin in Florida was so close that a recount would be necessary. Al Gore called Bush back and took back his concession. By the end of November, Gore filed a lawsuit forcing a recount and, specifically, that Florida count its numerous uncounted ballots and develop a method for dealing with chads. At this point, some counties in Florida had people vote by punching holes in their ballots next to their preferred candidate. Sometimes, the hole punch just made a dent, other times the punched out piece of paper didn’t come all the way off, resulting in what were called “dimpled chads” and “hanging chads” that rendered the vote uncounted. The trial court ruled against Gore, but then the Florida Supreme Court reversed, appointing a state court judge to oversee a count of all uncounted ballots in the state. Bush appealed this ruling up to the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 ruling on December 12, 2000, fully 5 weeks after election day, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Bush v. Gore that held that Florida did not establish sufficient standards for how uncounted votes should be counted, which violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, so counting could not continue until Florida established those standards. But instead of remanding the case back to Florida to establish those standards, the Supreme Court went further, ruling that since Florida indicated it wanted to choose its electors by December 12, the day the court issued its ruling, that it wouldn’t be possible to do a recount by that date, so all counting should stop, effectively removing the choice of election processes from the state as required by the constitution, and handing the presidency to George Bush, the loser of the popular vote. Because the recount never happened and the anomalies in hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and other issues on election day, the world actually will never know who truly won Florida in the 2000 election. But the world knows, without a doubt, that the majority of voters who cast their ballots nationwide in the 2000 presidential election wanted Al Gore to be president. How the outcome of this consequential presidential election shaped history, as it was closely followed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the US entrance into wars in the middle east that would last decades and cost thousands of lives, is another mystery the world will never have an answer to. But since that election, the question of the legitimacy of the electoral college, which caused the issue in Florida to begin with, has only grown in importance. That it happened again a few short years later in the 2016 election which Hilary Clinton won by over 2 and a half MILLION votes but lost in the electoral college, made the issue all the more front and center in the minds of voters who spend every presidential election wondering whether the will of the majority will matter at all.
The discussion around the electoral college is once again in the headlines after last week’s midterm elections, not because of any close call elections, it was a midterm, the electoral college doesn’t come into play again until 2028, but because of the growing movement to circumvent the electoral college wherever possible, which may have reached a critical mass with the election of so many democratic governors and state legislatures, enough to potentially solidify opposition to the electoral college in the form of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. What is this interstate compact, what does it call for, will it get the support it needs to make a difference, and is it even constitutional?
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Now that the dust has mostly settled on the results of the midterm elections last week, conversations are moving forward about what Democrats can DO with this newfound majority. I talked earlier this week about replacing Jeffries and Schumer, please continue to call your reps because it’s very much still an ongoing conversation. Beyond that, a number of things are making the long list of problems that Democrats need to address if they hope to hold on to their majorities and win back the trust of the American voters. So it may seem a little out of left field that amidst all this talk of accountability, impeachment, medicare for all, and more, the electoral college, an anachronistic, confusing aspect of presidential elections that doesn’t really make it into the conversation outside of once every four years, is making a lot of headlines.
And that’s because of this thing called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea for the compact grew out of the contentious 2000 presidential race and was formalized in 2006 with the creation of National Popular Vote Inc., a nonprofit that advocates for this interstate compact and apparently has not updated its website once since it was founded in 2006 based on my research and I only point this out because it is endlessly shocking to me in the year of our lord 2026 that people attempting to pass nationwide legislation haven’t figured out that technology, social media, and accessibility are really important parts of advocating for any cause but I DIGRESS. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact or NPVIC is pretty simple, it states that any state and DC can join the compact by adopting it as law in their state, and it would require the state to designate all of its electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. So no matter how the state itself votes, it will designate ALL of its electoral college votes for whoever wins the national popular vote. It essentially renders the electoral college moot because whoever wins the national popular vote will get all the electors. However, the compact only goes into effect once states encompassing at least 270 electoral votes sign on. There are 538 total electors. 270 are needed to win a majority. If there aren’t enough electors among the states signed on to the agreement to constitute a majority, then the compact won’t work. But once enough states are signed on, then that guarantees that whoever wins the national popular vote will get at least half the electoral college and, therefore, win the presidency. So not all 50 states plus DC must sign on to the compact to make it functional. Just enough to ensure that moving forward whoever wins the national popular vote will get a majority in the electoral college. So right now 18 states and DC currently have the NPVIC on the books, it’s just dormant because fewer than 270 electors are part of the compact. Those 18 states plus DC represent 222 electoral votes, 48 votes short.
What has this compact back in the headlines is because, thanks to this blue wave last week, 5 states now have democratic trifectas, democrats as governor and as majorities in both houses of their state legislatures. Those states are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. Those five states represent 61 electoral votes. So, theoretically, they could all join the compact, raising the total number of electoral votes in the compact to 283, thus rendering the electoral college moot for the 2028 presidential election. This is attractive to Democrats especially because their candidate won the popular vote for president but lost the presidency in both 2000 and 2016. So the fact that 5 more states are now controlled by Democrats entirely makes this a real possibility. But is it actually a good idea?
To understand that, we have to understand the electoral college. The constitution doesn’t call it the “electoral college” but it does lay it out pretty clearly: it says each state shall appoint a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives they have, combined. So every state has 2 senators, plus however many representatives they have, and that’s how many electors they get. In Minnesota, for example, that’s 2 senators plus 8 representatives to equal 10 total electors in the electoral college. The way in which the state chooses WHO will be those electors is entirely up to the state legislature. Those electors then vote by ballot for the president and the vice president and whoever gets the most votes wins. In the original constitution those electors voted for two people and whoever got the most votes became president and whoever got the second most votes became vice president, but that got very complicated in the election of 1800 when Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson got the same number of votes and Alexander Hamilton had to be the tie casting vote after 35 ballots were cast over the course of 6 days. So the constitution was quickly amended a couple years later via the 12th Amendment so now electors specify who they wish to vote for for president and who for vice president separately.
Now when the electoral college was created, the framers of the constitution weren’t contemplating the idea of political parties, there wasn’t this idea that the president and the vice president would be members of the same party and run on the same ticket. The idea was that the state legislatures would be in the best position to decide how to choose the best most learned and noble men to fulfill the role of elector, and that those electors would get together in their respective states and they would deliberate amongst themselves until they chose who they wished to vote for, based on their learned expertise, to be President and Vice president. It was up to the legislature of each state to decide how those electors would be picked, and in the first handful of presidential elections those electors were largely chosen by appointment by the state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1824 that the first popular vote for president was ever recorded and reported. And it wasn’t until 1880 that every state agreed that popular vote was the best way to choose the electors for their state.
By the early 1800s, the United States 2-party system was taking shape, and it became apparent that the electoral college was less about a group of learned men coming together to deliberate and more about each party in charge in each respective state appointing electors who pledged loyalty to their party’s candidate. They were selecting electors based on loyalty, not on their ability to independently deliberate and make a decision. Thus, the modern day electoral college was born. So when you cast your ballot for president and you marked the box next to Kamala Harris, for example, you aren’t voting for Harris directly. You are voting for the electors. And the electors that the legislature chooses will be determined based on who wins the popular vote in the state. So if Harris won the popular vote, then the electors who have pledged loyalty to the democrats and to vote for the democrats are selected, and THEY are the ones whose votes actually directly elect the president.
So why the fuck did the founding fathers set up this convoluted system for picking a president when a direct popular vote would be a hell of a lot simpler? Well, in part, because slavery. Of course. Remember learning about the 3/5ths compromise in high school? That comes into play here. That was a compromise made between non-slave states in the north and slave states in the south relating to the apportionment of representatives. So the number of representatives a state has is based on population size. To determine the size of the population, southern states were allowed to count their enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person, making their population much larger and therefore allowing them to have more representatives even though much of the population couldn’t vote and didn’t have any rights. This was to ensure the creation of the United States could move forward and avoid conflict with southern states that were really testy about protecting slavery. If the northern abolitionist states gained too much power in the house of representatives they could take away their precious slavery, you see. The same is true with the electoral college because, again, it’s determined via the number of members of congress each state has. And so to avoid conflict and move forward with the creation of the United States, the electoral college was a compromise that gave southern states a larger role in the federal government than they would have had if presidents were chosen via popular vote, which at the time would have likely been limited to wealthy white men.
Besides slavery, the electoral college is also an outcropping of the founders’ dedication to small r republicanism. The first republic was in ancient Rome. The concept of one person, one vote was not practiced in Rome. Instead, they adopted the idea of voting units. The majority of votes within one unit counted as the outcome of that unit, and then the majority of units constituted the final outcome of the voting. That’s exactly where our electoral college comes from. While the people are still the source of a republic’s power, their will is filtered through representatives and there is a constitution or charter of rights that protects minority interests. However, in Rome, those in higher socioeconomic classes were given more voting units. So the richer you were, the more your voice counted.This was based on the republican belief that the unwashed masses probably didn’t know how to properly run a government, and a ruling class made more sense than allowing everyone to speak for themselves. This was also something our founding fathers believed pretty fervently in. They were incredibly wary of mob rule, and they fully excluded everyone except landed white men in their constitution. This was a feature not an oversight. The electoral college also ensures that the will of the smaller, less populated states, isn’t overtaken by larger, more urban states. In practice it gives people from smaller or less populous states a vote that carries more weight. One elector vote accounts for 175,000 people in Wyoming compared to there being one elector for every 700,000 people in California.
In theory the electoral college also ensures that candidates are forced to focus on campaigning in places outside of the major cities and in more rural areas. The problem is that instead of pushing candidates to campaign across the country, the electoral college instead focuses campaigning in a few arbitrary swing states that tend to go one way or another in every election, giving those swing states like Iowa or Florida or Ohio outsized influence over candidates’ campaign promises. So a handful of farmers in Iowa can get promises from candidates that voters in non-swing states can’t get. The idea that a national popular vote would lead the candidates to only focus on major cities is also unfounded given the fact that less than 25% of the US population is located in the 10 largest cities in the country. So if a candidate exclusively focused on the largest cities in the country they would not be able to win the popular vote. Inevitably, there would be areas and cities that are more closely divided than others, and going to larger cities is more efficient than going door to door in a rural area when it comes to talking to people, but getting rid of the electoral college would get rid of the arbitrary focus on a few swing states and instead require candidates to campaign more broadly and build consensus around the country instead of in a few states. As it currently stands, MOST states are what’s called “spectator states.” We’re just watching what happens in the swing states and hoping for the best. Most of the 2016 presidential campaign, for example, took place in just 4 states.
And this isn’t just a partisan issue, even though it was Democrats that were hurt in 2000 and 2016. For example, my home state of Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1972. That means that in every presidential election since Jimmy Carter, if you are a Republican voter in Minnesota your vote for president didn’t matter and candidates barely spent any time in the state trying to hear your concerns or win your vote, because they knew it didn’t matter. So this goes both ways.
That being said, however, it is highly likely that should enough states sign on to the NPVIC it would face serious challenges in court. Because of course the electoral college HAS benefitted Republicans in the past so it benefits them to keep it in place. And they would have a strong argument in favor of this attempt to nullify the electoral college going against the framers’ intent. As I argued in a recent video, “originalism” is a concept made up in the 70s by right wing operatives as a backlash against New Deal progressivism and so I don’t think the founders’ intent should matter, especially considering the fact that they explicitly left it up to the states to determine who their electors would be. If a state chooses to select electors that pledge to vote for whoever wins the national popular vote, the constitution makes it pretty clear that’s their prerogative. And it is distinctly anti-democratic to be beholden to the made up, cherry picked conjecture about what the founders might have wanted 250 years ago over the desires of the very alive members of the current electorate of the United States. Fully 63% of those currently alive Americans want the president to be chosen by popular vote, not the electoral college. This interstate compact may be the best option for ensuring that outcome without having to pass a whole constitutional amendment, a feat that we haven’t managed to do in my lifetime.
Here’s a map from the National Popular Vote nonprofit. Green states have already joined the compact. If you are in a gray state or especially if you are in a yellow state, one of five with new democratic trifectas, reach out to your state legislators, so your state senator or state representatives that sit in your state’s capitol and write state laws, contact them and voice your support for them to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If you go to national popular vote dot com and input your zip code it will create a handy message you can easily send your state representatives. But as I said in my last video, calling is always best. It’s not a silver bullet to solve all the issues facing the United States today, but it would take us a step closer to actual representative democracy, which I think is a worthwhile cause.
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If you liked this video, you’ll like my video from Monday discussing why Schumer and Jeffries have got to go.
