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The effort to bypass the Electoral College and choose the president via the national popular vote has historically seemed like a long shot. But after an impressive string of legislative victories this year, maybe it should be taken more seriously.
The National Popular Vote initiative aims to create an interstate compact to effectively “abolish” the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. States that join the compact agree to award their electoral votes not to the candidate who wins that state, but to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. (States can do this because there is no national law dictating how they should award their electoral votes; indeed, the Constitution explicitly leaves it to state legislatures to decide.) However, the compact will go into effect only when the states that have signed on are worth 270 electoral votes — enough to ensure that the popular vote winner wins the election.
In the 13 years since the initiative started, support for joining the compact has largely been limited to Democratic-leaning states, probably because the two times in recent history when the Electoral College winner lost the popular vote, the split benefited the Republican candidate. By the end of 2018, the compact had been joined by 12 jurisdictions (11 states and the District of Columbia) that were worth a combined 172 electoral votes. But all of them were safe Democratic jurisdictions, and supporters of the initiative had almost run out of blue states to sign up. There was little indication that they could conscript the purple or red states that the compact needs to take effect.
But then 2019 happened. The compact found three additional states willing to sign on, with three more seemingly on the cusp of doing so. And unlike previous years, the new and pending members include some hard-fought presidential swing states.
