One of Tuesday’s biggest winners wasn’t even on the ballot. The National Popular Vote compact received an unexpected and significant shot in the arm this week.
With the Democratic governors and legislative majorities suddenly slated to take seats in January, the compact would have sufficient potential Dem support in place to enlist enough states (representing enough electoral votes) to activate the basic premise: States would direct their presidential electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote total.
Why would this hinge on Democratic support?
Well, this century has highlighted the weakness of the Electoral College with regard to the whole “one person, one vote” concept. As it happens, the benefactors have been Republicans, as we all painfully remember.
Beyond that, the American right has deployed a vast toolbox to undermine the “one person, one vote” concept dating back to, well, before we were a country.
Any American who is anything other than a white, male, Protestant landowner has any number of people to thank for chipping away at this nation’s inherent “conservative” instinct to limit and control electoral influence.
It’s a pet topic of mine as one of three keys I never miss a chance to list for rehabilitating our political infrastructure:
- Campaign finance reform (which I addressed when Hawaii took a stab at it last May);
- Independent redistricting commissions (which we saw a desperate POTUS double down against this year and live to regret it); and
- Elimination of the Electoral College, a brokered compromise that has outlived its practical or moral argument.
Now, the current idea is a workaround, not a replacement. It has skeptics as well as the flat-out opponents who are clinging to it as their demographic and generational ship sails slowly into oblivion.
Some folks think such a compact would need to be approved by Congress, per the Constitution. Yet others think that the NPV would require an actual Constitutional amendment.
Either of those positions could be correct, or neither. If this SCOTUS is required to sort it out, then obviously odds would be slim. On the good side, as of three days ago, Congressional approval isn’t the dealbreaker that it once was.
So many Democratic policy items will be shoved to the side for two years until there’s a change in the Oval Office, hopefully for the better.
But a major change in voting rights/fairness is theoretically possible, with Donald Trump having no role in the process — other than how he screwed up so badly that these majorities became possible in the first place.
p.s. Don’t be shy in reminding your friends (and others) that the Republican presidential candidate has broken 50% exactly once in the last 38 years, and even then, it took a “war on terror” (and a war on the wrong country) for an incumbent George Bush to manage 50.73% in 2004.