Gordon L. Weil
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, defeating
Hillary Clinton who had been supported by most voters, the National Popular
Vote campaign gained momentum. The similar result in the election of
George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 had laid the groundwork.
The conventional wisdom, appealing to Democrats who are the
traditional losers when minority popular vote presidents are elected, is that
the electoral vote system favors the Republicans.
NPV supporters assert that the will of majority should not
be ignored, despite the outmoded electoral vote system found in the
Constitution.
Based on the compromise that brought the states on board,
the presidential election is a collection of elections in the states and
D.C. Because all states are constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of
three electoral votes, individual voters in the small, usually rural, states
have more voting power than those in larger states. By strict proportionality, small
states like Maine might get one electoral vote, which is clearly politically unacceptable.
The National Popular Vote campaign seeks an agreement among states
with a majority of electoral votes that their electors will vote for the candidate
winning a majority of the sum of the popular votes of all jurisdictions. With
enough participation, that group of states could determine the outcome of the
election no matter if others chose not to join.
Today, because of separate state elections, elections focus on
the few states where the outcome is not in question. Thus, the campaigns
concentrate on those swing states while taking for granted the result in other
states. With a national popular vote,
all individual voters are in play, which should result in a truly national
election and a better reflection of the people’s preference.
If National Popular Vote were adopted, this disproportionate
weight of voters would largely be solved. But each state would continue
to have its usual number of electoral votes, continuing to tilt the Electoral
College somewhat toward small states.
Until now, states with 207 Electoral Votes in 2020 have
voted for the NPV. All of them voted Democratic in that election.
No state that voted Republican has signed on.
For the NPV states to automatically determine the Electoral
College winner, additional states with 61 electoral votes would have to support
the proposed compact among states. In 2020, eight states with 86 votes
voted Democratic, but have not signed on.
Not all are likely to accept the NPV. Among these
states are swing jurisdictions – Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Nebraska’s
Second District – that had 43 Electoral Votes. If they do not support
NPV, only 43 votes remain among the Democratic-voting jurisdictions, not enough
to make NPV a reality. No GOP state is likely to join.
The conclusion is clear. The NPV is partisan. If
there were enough NPV states for the Democrats to overcome the supposed GOP
Electoral Vote advantage, the Democrats would win without needing the
NPV.
To be sure, the NPV could mean something if expected
Democratic states voted for GOP candidates or if some Republican states
accepted the NPV. If this were to happen, a state would accept being
bound to a result opposed by a majority of its own citizens. In theory,
NPV makes sense; in practice, it may not.
If the electoral vote and the popular vote more closely
coincided, the underlying reason for the NPV would be weakened. That may be happening this year.
In 2016, Clinton won a substantial majority of the
California vote, which helped boost her national popular majority. Some
of her votes there produced no electoral votes for her and were, in effect,
“wasted.”
It seems possible that this year, there will be fewer such
unneeded votes. In effect, the gap in swing states between Kamala Harris
and Trump could be closer to the national popular vote gap between
them.
Trump may be gaining support in overwhelmingly Democratic
California and New York. He’s also polling better in states that went
strongly for Republican congressional candidates in 2022. But his gains
in either case would not earn him more electoral votes, though they would contribute
to a narrower national popular vote margin.
At the same time, Harris is doing better than expected in
swing states. While her gains may involve fewer total voters than Trump’s
gains in solidly Democratic states, they indicate that she could win the
election with a narrow national popular vote margin.
Because this analysis is based on polling of varying quality,
these conclusions may be problematic. And it’s unknown if the polls
fairly account for new voters or if some voters will be denied access to the
ballot box.
Conventional wisdom has suggested that a Democrat needs to
win the national popular vote by a comfortable margin to be sure of winning most
electoral votes. That may not be the case.
