By Douglas V. Gibbs
Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution states that no State shall “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” Yet, “seventeen States and the District of Columbia have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, agreeing to allocate their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote – regardless of which candidate wins a majority of the state’s vote.” (Daily Signal)
Also known as the National Popular Vote Bill, had it been in effect in 2024, Donald Trump would have carried New York, California, the New England states, and a flurry of other “Blue States,” giving him 520 votes in the Electoral College which would have given Trump almost enough electors to win the most Electoral Votes in the history of presidential elections. 520, if achieved, would have been five short of Reagan’s 1984 win, and tie Nixon’s 1972 win. The attempt to assassinate the Electoral College is designed to ensure that regardless of what the Electoral College decides, the President with the most popular votes wins. The purveyors of a National Popular Vote claim that the Electoral College is a danger to democracy, even though only five times in history has the winner of a presidential election lost the popular vote – three times in the nineteenth century, and twice since the launch of the new millennium: 2000 (Gore v. Bush) and 2016 (Clinton v. Trump). In their arrogance, I am supposing, they were convinced that no Republican could ever win the popular vote again after Obama’s sweeping popular vote wins, Clinton’s loss despite earning a popular vote win, and Biden’s massive 81.2 million popular vote win. Granted, some people are wondering where the 10 million votes above the rising normal average that Biden got in 2020 went, with Harris only receiving 71,708,435 votes; Trump got 75.5 million. Newsweek released an article titled “Where Did the Millions of Joe Biden Votes Go?” a couple days after the election, before all of the votes had been tallied.
Where did those votes vanish to, indeed?
I have my thoughts, and a Trump Administration’s move to tighten election integrity may discover what we already know to be the truth in the coming months or years.
The National Popular Vote movement is fueled and largely funded by organizations hoping to push America more towards democracy, and away from its roots as a federal republic. The largest donor to the push to kill the Electoral College is the left-leaning Democracy Fund Voice, who contributed $400,000 in 2022. The Soros’s have also pumped money into the compact. The current membership of the compact possesses 209 electoral votes, but it doesn’t go into effect until the number of membership States increases to the point of possessing a minimum of 270 electoral votes, which is the total needed to reach a majority of electoral votes and elect a President. In 2024, if the agreement had been in operation it would have provided Donald Trump with more than two hundred additional electoral votes.
I am guessing that if something like that had happened, the Democrats would have suddenly discovered that the whole thing was unconstitutional and someone would sue. Trent England, the Executive Director of Save our States, which is an organization working to protect the Electoral College against the threat of the National Popular Vote, when asked about such a scenario stated, “one state court decision could unravel the entire compact.”
The Daily Signal reported, regarding the issue, that the National Popular Vote organization claims it is a myth that the national popular vote to elect a president would give an advantage to Democrats over Republicans. Donald Trump in 2024 proved that statement to be true in this new era of patriotic awakening, and I am guessing after Trump turns America around, J.D. Vance will likely enjoy back-to-back terms as President winning the popular vote both times, in addition to the number of electoral votes. During the next decade I am figuring the National Popular Vote agenda will die on the vine.
I have railed against the National Popular Vote over the years recognizing that the Electoral College protects us from the excesses of democracy. The Electoral College represents an important mechanism that was put in place to preserve the Republic by disallowing the population centers from over-dominating any election. The mechanisms of the republic serve (and served) as a check and balance against the populated areas dominating as a ruling faction. A National Popular Vote, if put in place as the sole mechanism to elect the President, could potentially make it so that the half-dozen largest cities in America would choose the President, and everyone else’s votes would not matter. In Federalist Paper #10, Madison explained that the best way to control the factions, and disallow any of them from dominating, was to set them against each other which could be accomplished by giving the minority voice a greater voice – something that the Electoral College accomplishes making even less-populated States vitally important in the counting of the electoral votes.
The Heritage Foundation in its ebook, The Essential Electoral College, explains, “The Electoral College prevents presidential candidates from winning an election by focusing solely on high-population urban centers and dense media markets, forcing them to seek the support of a larger cross-section of the American electorate. This addresses the Founders’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority,’ which has the potential to marginalize sizable portions of the population, particularly in rural and more remote areas of the country.”
It turns out Trump has spoiled the beliefs of the Democratic Party in more ways than most people have realized with his 2024 win. As more Americans become aware of the insane plans the Democrats have for America morally, politically, and economically, the drive to finish the left’s push for democracy will likely sputter, spin out of control, and find itself abandoned in some historical ditch along the side of the road of history.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
