Amid the excitement of the blue wave’s flashier victories in last week’s midterm elections—Blexas, Bliowa, and Blansas, anyone?—Democrats also quietly set themselves up for one of the biggest potential changes in the history of American politics: ending the Electoral College.
The Electoral College system was designed to ensure small states aren’t passed over by presidential campaigns, but in the process, it gives those often Republican-leaning states disproportionate control over presidential elections. It’s led to five cases in U.S. history where a candidate won the popular vote but lost the presidency, most recently in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump.
That’s why since 2006, some states have been working toward the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement to ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins the presidency. That two-decade effort could finally pay off, thanks to five states that flipped blue in the midterms.
How the midterms made it possible
For the compact to take effect, laws to join it must first be enacted by states whose combined electoral votes are enough to secure a presidential election. The 19 jurisdictions that have already passed laws pledging their votes to the compact (18 states and the District of Columbia) have a combined 222 electoral votes, still 48 shy of the 270 votes needed to win the presidency.
That’s where five newly blue states come in. Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania now have Democratic majorities in their state legislatures, matching their Democratic governors. Nevada did the opposite, flipping its governorship from red to blue while maintaining a Democratic legislative majority.
Those states now have a Democratic trifecta, controlling both chambers of their state legislatures and their governorships, setting them up to join the compact if their lawmakers wish. If all five states did so, they’d push the compact past the 270 vote threshold, guaranteeing that the winner of the popular vote would win the presidency as early as the 2028 election.
Challenges to the compact
The compact wouldn’t technically get rid of the Electoral College, a change that would require amending the Constitution. Rather, it requires that all participating states pledge their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, even if that candidate didn’t get the majority of votes in their state.
That sets the compact’s success up for legal challenges. Even if the laws toward the compact are enacted in all five states, it may still need congressional approval under the Constitution’s Compact Clause, then face a possible presidential veto. The compact could also become the subject of a Supreme Court case, leaving it at the mercy of SCOTUS’s conservative majority.
Getting rid of the Electoral College is the favored position among voters, though support varies by political affiliation. As of 2024, 63% of American adults supported letting the popular vote decide the presidential election. That includes 80% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans.
Still, whether states will actually take the leap and pledge their votes to the compact remains to be seen. Some key states have already blocked measures to join the compact in the past: In 2019, Nevada’s then-Governor Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, vetoed a bill to join, saying it could “diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests.” In 2023, Michigan’s legislature did not pass a bill to join the compact, despite also holding a Democratic trifecta at the time.
