What is meant by this is the total count of individual votes for each presidential candidate, added up from all 50 states. It is the first thing some sore losers have turned to after losing a presidential election. In 2016, you may recall, many Democrats took solace or vented their frustration by pointing out that “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.” These complaints were almost always followed closely by demands that the Electoral College be eliminated. It was and still is often said that unless the Electoral College is scrapped, we don’t really have a democracy.

This is increasingly so as the Democratic Party exiles itself to urban areas. The party can run up individual vote totals in large Democratic cities while doing nothing to increase its chances of Electoral College votes from swing states that don’t have a Los Angeles or New York City to produce a lopsided score.

Enter the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This is a plan of dubious constitutionality to undermine the electoral system. It would make elections less safe and even more partisan than they already are if you can imagine that.

The compact consists of states tying their votes in the Electoral College to the national popular vote total. It means that each state in the compact would award its electoral votes to the candidate with the most votes in the country, even if that candidate lost in that state. At present, 17 states and the District of Columbia have tied their 209 electoral votes to the national popular vote, getting closer to the 270 electoral votes needed for a candidate to become president.

The compact is popular only with Democrats, which makes sense because the party often wins the popular vote even when it loses the presidency. Democrats enthusiastic to tie their state’s Electoral College votes to the popular vote assume this will help Democrats, as indeed it would in current circumstances. But it is utterly devoid of principle.

There is a useful thought experiment one can force upon Democrats when they tout the “democratic” principle of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. All you need to do is ask them this: “So let’s say your state voted for Kamala Harris, but Donald Trump won the popular vote, you’d be content that your state’s Electoral College votes would be cast for Trump, right?” This usually produces a certain amount of stuttering and foot shuffling and the circumstantial but unprincipled retort, “But that’s not likely to happen.”

The compact fundamentally contradicts what America is supposed to be. We are the “United States,” or are supposed to be, which implies including all those participating in the federal system, not excluding those with whom one disagrees. 

The states make up the country. The nation does not have the right to treat smaller states as subservient departments.

The loss of this concept of genuine federalism is why the federal government has become more intrusive in everyday life, as voters and the parties, especially the Democratic Party, expect the president to absorb responsibilities that should fall to state governments.

The national popular vote idea is thus a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist. The system works as it is because it forces presidential candidates to make appeals to broad swaths of the country. Trump lost the popular vote but won 30 of the 50 states in 2016. A candidate needs to convince voters in Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia, states with unique cultures and issues, that he or she should be president.

A system that simply awarded the presidency to the winner of the most votes nationwide would produce campaigns intent solely on riling up their party base. If the country is divided now, as it is, imagine a national popular vote election that frees Democrats and Republicans alike from the tempering effect of “swing states” and instead encourages them to juice up antagonisms to drive their flock to polling places.

Thus far, only Democratic-controlled states and Washington, D.C., have signed on to the compact. This stems from Democratic chagrin about the 2000 election that Al Gore lost. They believe dearly that he should have been the winner because he “won the popular vote” against George W. Bush. The 2016 election revived that sentiment after Clinton “won the popular vote” but not the presidency.

The 2016 election is a perfect representation of how Democrats view the electoral system. Clinton’s campaign ran up vote totals in big liberal cities. Her win by 2.9 million in the popular vote is due solely to her ability to rack up a landslide in California. She secured a margin of 1.7 million in Los Angeles County alone. Clinton was very popular in small pockets of the country where Democratic voters congregate, so both she and the Democratic Party think she shouldn’t have to waste their time trying to win voters in the middle of the country. She didn’t visit the swing state of Wisconsin once after the Democratic National Convention. She and the blue party regarded the heartland as literally flyover country. Basing the presidential election result on the national popular vote tally would make that permanent.

Democrats seem to think that because their popular vote margin doesn’t mean anything in the current electoral system, that system must change. In truth, it is the Democrats who must change. They must change to try to win votes in flyover country. It is the same logic behind the Democratic push for statehood for Washington, D.C., which would gift the Democratic Party two senators. Democrats don’t want to have to campaign in states in the middle of the country to get power on Capitol Hill.

It should be noted that the compact contains a trigger, and states don’t have to pull that trigger until enough states join to reach 270 electoral votes. It’s just another wrinkle Democrats added to ensure they don’t accidentally award a Republican presidential candidate the White House in a scenario in which the GOP wins the “popular vote” but Democrats win the Electoral College, a possibility this November.

So, the popular vote compact fails in principle with what the U.S. is meant to be and fails in concept as a “solution” to an imagined problem, given that it is nothing more than a Democratic power grab. Just as damning, though, is that the national popular vote would fail in practice by making elections more prone to widespread fraud and fuel rampant distrust among the general public.

If you thought Trump’s election conspiracy theories were bad in 2020, imagine how many people would reasonably believe them under a popular vote system. A national popular vote would encourage political actors in both parties to engage in all kinds of chicanery, including voter fraud and voter suppression, because the goal would simply be to have more votes total than the other team.

While Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud are weak, there is some fraud that pops up in competitive races, such as in the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, which secured the Democratic Party the filibuster-proof Senate majority that gave us Obamacare. The incentive to cheat in a presidential election decided only by raw vote totals rather than electoral votes would lead to far more fraud on a much larger scale.

This isn’t just a hypothetical, given that Democrats in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois all tried to remove Trump from their ballots. That would all but guarantee a Democratic win in the “popular vote,” resulting in a tit-for-tat in which each state ends up with one presidential candidate on the ballot depending on what party runs the state.

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Picture the 2016 election, with Trump leading by some 2 million votes the day after the election, only for California’s glacial vote count to chip away at that lead for more than a month. It wouldn’t be until December that all the votes would be counted in California, giving far more credence to accusations that Democrats would “find” votes to make up the total they needed.

The national popular vote compact is lazy, destructive, ill-thought-out, blatantly partisan, and a defiance of the principles that make up America’s federal system. It is thus the perfect Democratic policy. As a means of choosing American presidents, it would manage to make every aspect of campaigns, governance, institutional trust, and the balance of power between states and the federal government worse. Given that both parties claim their last presidential loss only happened because the race was “stolen” from them, this supposed “solution” couldn’t come at a worse time.