An effort led by Democrats to scrap or bypass the Electoral College and shift presidential elections to contests decided by the national popular vote has almost no chance of succeeding, guaranteeing Democrats will again have to defeat Trump in the Electoral College they lost in 2016 while winning more votes nationally.
The Electoral College places the power to elect presidents in the hands of individual states and is enshrined in the Constitution.
The hurdles to amend the Constitution and move to the national popular vote are steep. So the bipartisan National Popular Vote interstate compact seeks to subvert this constitutional shield by convincing states to throw their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate wins their state. Compact supporters believe this doesn’t require amending the Constitution, but that notion would be challenged in the courts.
But the effort has run into another problem — stiff political resistance from Republicans, who lately see the Electoral College as possibly their only viable path to the White House.
The Republican Party’s appreciation for the Electoral College, and tradition of granting electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote within each state, has blossomed since Trump “pierced the blue wall” in 2016. The president won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states the GOP hadn’t carried in decades, capturing the White House even as he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Especially with Trump poised to win re-election without carrying the popular vote, Democrats’ frustration with the existing system is rising. Liberal activists are demanding the Electoral College be abolished.
“That man has no chance of winning the popular vote,” Democratic operative Rodell Mollineau said, even as he acknowledged that Trump might win re-election anyway.
[Related: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College]
But in an era of bitter, divisive politics, clearing the threshold required for amendments, two-thirds of the Congress, and three quarters of the states, is a practical impossibility, emphasized Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College in Northeastern Pennsylvania who studies the Electoral College.
“In this case it would be fairly unlikely because there are a lot of people who benefit from the Electoral College, particularly Republicans,” Brauer said.
The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a creative way around the barrier erected by the Constitution.
Most states deliver their Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote within their borders, although a few allocate per congressional district.
Under the compact, states that agree to the changes would only be bound to them once enough states pass similar laws such that between them, their combined electoral votes equal 270, the number required to win the presidency. According to the group spearheading this effort, 12 states and Washington, D.C., which has 3 electoral votes, have joined the compact.
All 13 of those jurisdictions tend to vote Democrat for president, meaning the fresh push for popular vote elections from the Democratic White House contenders is unlikely to net more support for reforming how the Electoral College operates. That would require a burst of support in red territory, unlikely at a time when many Republicans are resigned to Trump, and possibly future GOP nominees, losing the popular vote.
[Also read: CNN claims James Madison called the Electoral College ‘evil.’ He didn’t]
But even if the political atmosphere changed and more states joined the compact, Lara Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University who has written extensively about the Electoral College, foresees an additional sticking point.
“Beyond the questionable constitutionality of this inter-state but outside of Congress compact, this idea fails to recognize the possibility that a person’s vote could be completely invalidated if the national popular vote goes in the opposite direction the majority in their state,” Brown said. “This compact moves the representation even further away from a person’s vote.”
