EXCLUSIVE: Michigan Deals Blow to National Popular Vote Push

Grassroots Michigan voters rose up this month and forced their legislators to table a bill to join their state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). This compact would force Michigan to award its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The NPVIC has come dangerously close to reaching 270 electoral votes. Once they reach that threshold, the NPVIC would effectively amend the Constitution without a constitutional amendment by abolishing the Electoral College (EC). In this inning, at least, leftists have struck out in a key swing state.

The Left follows a similar pattern across state lines, borders, and generations. They organize. They lose. They attack the system as unfair.

Like their Bolshevik forbears, leftists can’t imagine common people rejecting the wonderful plans they have in store for them, so they attribute electoral loss to the system being rigged or the masses’ votes being suppressed. In the U.S., they blame the EC. As they have no hope of amending the Constitution to get rid of it, they’re on the cusp of scrapping it through an agreement among states to override the Founders’ wishes by ignoring it.

Sore loser Democrats created the NPVIC after George W. Bush lost the popular vote but beat Al Gore in 2000. Then-First Lady Hilary Clinton remarked, “In a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College.” This sentiment and the national popular vote movement exploded on the Left after she won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the EC to Donald Trump.

Before Trump’s election, only heavily Democratic states joined the NPVIC. During his first term, however, “the Resistance” secured the purple states of Colorado and New Mexico and, under Biden, Minnesota and Maine, bringing the total to 17 states and Washington, D.C.

Gov. Steve Sisolak’s (D) veto kept Nevada from joining and bipartisan opposition in the Virginia Senate tabled it. Had those states joined, the NPVIC would have stood at 228 electoral votes—41 shy of repealing the EC, and with Michigan’s 15 electoral votes, one large state away from victory.

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Michigan Beats Back the National Popular Vote Movement—For Now

Michigan legislators introduced bills to join Michigan with the NPVIC in the state House and Senate in March 2023. In the 2024 election, Republicans flipped the House from a Democratic two-seat majority to a Republican six-seat majority, ending Democrats’ trifecta under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). A week after the election, Democrats decided to put two national popular vote bills up to a vote before their lame duck session ends.

In an interview with Restoration News, Michigan Fair Elections (MFE) Chair Patrice Johnson said the initiative came up quickly after a holiday when no one was paying attention.

The advocacy arms of conservative organizations like MFE and the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) issued calls-to-action, resulting in thousands of grassroots Michigan patriots calling their elected representatives, demanding they kill the bills. This prompted the legislature to remove the bills for November’s agenda; though, the threat of their reviving them in December still looms.

“Because we have an active network of members,” Johnson told Restoration News, “we were able to put out a call to action through Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME), our 501(c)(4); Save Our States; and AMAC, and they all alerted their folks.”

It was actually in the evening, on a Monday night, when it came across our screens that they were going to schedule a vote. It turned out they didn’t have enough people, so they rescheduled it for Wednesday. By that time, we had organized so many phone calls to their offices that I had people calling me, saying, “Patrice, you don’t need to call us anymore. We’re not going to vote for this.” 

Johnson stressed the danger of the lame duck session hasn’t ended.

“They’re trying to ram through all this crap that they normally wouldn’t before they lose their majority” she said. “They’re trying to pass their wish list of ways to give them an advantage in future elections.”

She noted Michiganders aren’t the main actors pushing to join their state with the NPVIC: “This is being funded by big money from outside our state by people who want to tear down our federalist system.”

A National Popular Vote Would Destroy the American System of Government

Hearing sore-loser leftists describe it, one would think the U.S. is the only country that doesn’t elect its executive via national popular vote. But plenty of first-world countries have systems in which the legislative body chooses the executive, which is even less democratic than the EC. Others like France, Austria, and Romania have a semi-presidential system where the people elect a president who shares executive duties with an appointed prime minister. For most countries, a nation’s president is like the Speaker of the House of Representatives or the Senate Majority Leader. The people elect their representative at the local level, and the representatives elect someone to lead them.

The U.S. is especially unique because of the separate states, which leftists despise because they present an impediment to a centralized government that controls every aspect of people’s lives.

Abolishing the EC would threaten smaller states’ relevance in the federal system the Founders established.

In a statement, David Guenthner, vice president for government affairs at the Mackinac Center, said, “This shifts the power in presidential elections to large states like California and New York that are capable of producing the largest vote totals, while muffling the voices of smaller states like Michigan.”

Johnson warned a national popular vote “totally ignores the differences between the states and the people in those states,” and if enough states join the NPVIC, “No candidate would pay any attention to Michigan or any of the states in the middle of the country.”

She added this would be like asking the Southwest if they want Michigan’s water, and giving people in Michigan no say if they want to provide it or not.

Even a Democrat like Sisolak stated in his veto message: “In cases like this, where Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states, I will always stand up for Nevada.”

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A national popular vote would also give an advantage to states with lax voter laws, making every presidential election susceptible to fraud.

“While the National Popular Vote compact requires all states to cast their electoral votes to the same candidate, it does not require states to conduct federal elections according to the same procedures or ballot security standards,” noted Guenthner.

Abolishing the EC would also make it appear more logical for the federal government to nationalize and standardize election laws since individual states would no longer matter in presidential elections. This would create a race to the bottom in quality of voter laws, as each state’s importance in presidential elections would depend on how many ballots it can credibly stuff.

Further, it would produce a race to the bottom in news coverage and propaganda.

During the debate over the EC in the Constitutional Convention, Massachusetts Delegate Elbridge Gerry warned against a popular election of the president, arguing, “The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men.” This sounds undemocratic and elitist to modern sensibilities. But as not everyone is fit for law school, so too everyone doesn’t have the time to become an equally informed voter. If that were the case, 24-hour news channels, think tanks, and super PACs wouldn’t exist. In a national popular vote system, special interest “news” outlets would explode, catering only to the most populous sections of the country; aiming the most libelous, pedestrian propaganda at some of the least productive and most indifferent members of society.

Finally, the EC prevents a single region from dominating the presidency by running up the vote for regional candidates or candidates from a regional political party. This prevents civil conflict by ensuring the president forms a geographically broad coalition.

Before Bush in 2000, Grover Cleveland was the last president to win the popular vote and lose the EC. He did this by running up the vote in the Democratic “Solid South.” Without the EC, he would have become not only a plurality president like Abraham Lincoln, but his opponents would have likewise viewed him as a regional imposition, threatening national disunity, and possibly disunion.

“There’s no reason to support this foolishness,” said Johnson. “For anyone to support it, they have to be ignorant or want to tear down our system.”

Winning the National Popular Vote Deflated the Left But Didn’t End Its Threat to the Electoral College

Donald Trump’s election this year doesn’t only feel different from 2016. It is different because of the Left’s demoralization. As Politico puts it: “Instead of tuning in, the audiences that fueled the post-2016 resistance are checking out.”

They succored themselves in 2016 and beyond with the belief that Trump won by a fluke but lacked popular support, having failed to win the popular vote or break the 50 percent approval mark. The Russia collusion hoax made them doubt even the legitimacy of his EC win.

But as Trump has since won both the popular vote and broken 50 percent in his approval rating, the illusion of majority opposition to Trump and conservative policies is quickly crumbling.

In six days following the election, Democrat viewers’ top two networks, CNN and MSNBC, tumbled in average 2024 viewership by 19 and 36 percent respectively—despite Fox News growing its viewership by 56 percent.

Politico blames the lack of a “menacing foreign power,” an “archaic Constitutional provision,” or a “bumbling FBI director,” while noting, “The people, in their wisdom, made Trump the legitimate president.”

The emphasis the Left places on the national popular vote also shows in their disinterest in protesting the inauguration. In 2017, Trump’s election and inauguration were met with costly riots in multiple cities, including Washington, D.C. This year, organizers expect a paltry 50,000—five percent of the 2017 Women’s March.

When the Women’s March tried to organize a repeat performance on Instagram, they were met with indifference. One follower replied: “No im tired, yall have fun though.” 

As Michigan Democrats have shown, however, this does not mean they have disabused themselves of the notion that most Americans are with them or that they are giving up on abolishing the EC. Their leaders still believe history is on their side and that they lost only because of a poor candidate choice and failure to properly explain their policies to voters.

Michigan’s grassroots victory over the NPVIC merits celebrating and temporarily sets back efforts to overthrow the constitutional system America’s Founders put in place to protect the interests of individual states’ citizens.

The fight, however, is far from over, and Michigan Democrats could try again in December before their lame duck session ends. Although the national popular vote is being pushed by disgruntled Democrats, some like former Gov. Sisolak recognize abandoning the time-tested means of electing the president in favor of raw democracy would irreparably harm smaller states and their interests, further dividing Americans.

In the interest of a united country and the federalist system the Founders created, voters should not only reject their states’ joining the NPVIC but seek to withdraw from it if their states have already joined.

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