The Time Republicans Feared Is Nigh—Democrats Can Now Bypass the Electoral College
With new trifectas in hand, Democrats stand on the brink of effectively amending the U.S. Constitution without an amendment.
The 2026 midterms delivered what constitutional conservatives have long dreaded. Democrats now control enough state governments to activate the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) and sideline the Electoral College.
With trifectas in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada—states holding a combined 61 electoral votes—Democrats can push the compact from its current 222 votes past the 270-vote threshold required to take effect. Once that happens, every participating state will award its electors to the national popular-vote winner—regardless of how its own citizens voted.
This is not hypothetical. Virginia joined in April 2026, three months after its new Democratic trifecta took power. Republicans can no longer treat the compact as a distant progressive fantasy. The Electoral College could be gone in 2028.
Constitutional Conservatives Should Not Rely on the Supreme Court to Save Them
Elections have consequences. If enough states join the NPVIC, Republicans will likely have to live with that outcome until they win enough state governments to pull the pledged electoral votes back below the threshold.
There is a weak argument to make that bypassing the Electoral College would alter the federal system enough to render it unconstitutional without congressional consent. But the conservative Supreme Court's jurisprudence rightly rejects judicial activism that rewrites constitutional text to achieve preferred policy outcomes.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution gives each state legislature the power to appoint electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." The NPVIC is arguably an exercise of that authority. The Supreme Court has held that the Compact Clause does not require congressional consent for every interstate agreement and that states possess broad discretion over their own electors.
The Case for the Electoral College Remains Strong—and Winnable
None of this means that the compact is inevitable. Republicans should not lose hope and assume that Democratic voters agree with every harebrained idea their party's special interests and activist base support. On voter ID, for instance, there is a huge gap between what Democratic elites and rank-and-file Democratic voters want. The same can be true with the Electoral College if constitutional conservatives put in the work making the case for the vision the Founders had for electing the president.
The NPVIC gained traction among Democratic elites and voters alike because it marked the second time in five presidential elections in which their party won the popular vote but lost the presidential election. It’s easy to convince voters to abolish a system that awards the presidency to the popular-vote loser if they don’t understand why it exists, or if it just cost their candidate the White House.
The Electoral College is not an accident or a relic. It is the mechanism that forces presidential candidates to build geographically broad coalitions rather than maximizing votes in the largest urban centers. Without it, candidates could ignore entire regions of the country and still win. A national popular vote would concentrate campaigns in a handful of dense population centers. The Electoral College also does not make the United States a global anomaly as liberals would have voters believe. Parliamentary systems do not rely on the popular vote to elect their heads of state either.
Abolishing that safeguard would also erode the federal character of the republic. States would cease to function as distinct political communities in presidential elections and would become little more than large administrative subdivisions. The social contract weakens when large numbers of citizens conclude that their votes in their own states no longer matter.
Constitutional conservatives can win this argument with levelheaded Democratic legislators. In 2024, Michigan Democrats held a narrow trifecta and moved to join the compact during their lame-duck session. Grassroots activists, including Michigan Fair Elections and other election-integrity groups, flooded them with calls and emails. The pressure worked. Democrats pulled the bills.
Former U.S. Senate candidate and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who co-sponsored the bill to join, told her supporters, “It’s really important to understand that political parties are not a monolith. … Just because Democrats were in the majority in both the state house and the state senate, that doesn't mean that every Democrat agrees.”
The same dynamic can operate elsewhere. In smaller states like Maine, constitutional conservatives have made the argument that rural Democrats' interests will get trampled if the national popular vote rules the White House.
Democrats have the numbers to enact a national popular vote. Constitutional conservatives should not put their hope in the Supreme Court to save the Electoral College, nor should they assume that they have no influence over elected Democrats. To do this, they must make the case to their Democratic lawmakers and the electorate that it is not simply a firewall to help Republicans cheat the popular vote but a firewall to ensure every segment of the country has a seat at the table.
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