The blue wave may give us the national popular vote

If you’re not glutted on good news already, here’s another implication of the Democratic midterm tsunami that deserves more attention: By the 2028 election, we may be choosing the president with a national popular vote.

The electoral college is a blight on American democracy. It gives outsize importance to voters in a handful of unrepresentative swing states, while diminishing the importance of everyone else. It means that conservative voters in reliably blue states, and liberal voters in reliably red states, have no voice at all when it comes to choosing the president. Worst of all, it allows a candidate to win the presidency with only a minority of all votes cast. That shouldn’t be possible in a democracy.

But getting rid of the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment. That isn’t likely to happen, since the states that benefit the most from it would have to vote away their own power.

Instead, reform advocates came up with a clever end-run around the electoral college: the National Popular Vote Compact. States that join the compact pledge to award their electoral votes, not to the candidate who wins that state, but to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide. This is allowed under the Constitution, which gives state legislatures the power to allocate their electoral votes any way they wish (Article II, Section 1).

The National Popular Vote Compact takes effect once it’s been enacted into law by jurisdictions which represent 270 electoral votes (an absolute majority of the total 538). As of November 2026, it’s been passed by 18 states plus the District of Columbia, representing 222 electoral votes.

To put it into effect, we need states which hold 48 more electoral votes. Currently, the holdouts include Nevada (6 EVs), Arizona (11 EVs), Michigan (10 EVs), Wisconsin (10 EVs), and Pennsylvania (19 EVs).

But as a result of the 2026 blue wave, Democrats will likely have a trifecta in all five of those states.

A Democratic lock on state government has already been confirmed in four of the five – in some cases, for the first time in decades. Votes are still being counted in Arizona, but a Democratic trifecta looks likely there as well.

This should be Democrats’ number-one priority when they take office. It’s hard to exaggerate how big this is. If we chose the president with a popular vote, George W. Bush would have lost in 2000, and Donald Trump would have lost in 2016.

It would reshape the landscape of American politics, making it impossible for presidential candidates to win solely by courting white conservatives in small rural states. It would boost the electoral importance of the large, diverse, progressive metropolises where most Americans actually live. That’s as it should be. Democrats have the power to do this now, if they choose. We the voters just need to force them to use it.

StevoR says

November 5, 2026 at 10:03 am

Yes! Yes please!

One vote one value please.

Not the situation we have here :

But the biggest vice of the Electoral College is its blatant unfairness to voters in the bigger states. As a resident of the largest state, California, I look at the residents of the smallest state, Wyoming, with particular envy during election season. Each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in California. How can that be, you might ask? It’s easy to see, when you do the math. Although Wyoming had a population in the last census of only 563,767, it gets 3 votes in the Electoral College based on its two Senators and one Congressman. California has 55 electoral votes. That sounds like a lot more, but it isn’t when you consider the size of the state. The population of California in the last census was 37,254,503, and that means that the electoral votes per capita in California are a lot less. To put it another way, the three electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each. The 55 electors in California represent an average of 677,355 each, and that’s a disparity of 3.6 to 1.

This has to change. Each resident of the United States should have the same voting power. The simplest way to achieve this is to abolish the Electoral College and insist that everyone’s vote stand on its own. That would constitute true electoral reform. You can call our current anachronistic system many things, but you can’t call it a democracy.

Source : https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-the-electoral-college_b_12891764

From 2017 but doubt things have improved since and likely worsened.

Comments

StevoR says

November 5, 2026 at 10:03 am

Yes! Yes please!

One vote one value please.

Not the situation we have here :

But the biggest vice of the Electoral College is its blatant unfairness to voters in the bigger states. As a resident of the largest state, California, I look at the residents of the smallest state, Wyoming, with particular envy during election season. Each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in California. How can that be, you might ask? It’s easy to see, when you do the math. Although Wyoming had a population in the last census of only 563,767, it gets 3 votes in the Electoral College based on its two Senators and one Congressman. California has 55 electoral votes. That sounds like a lot more, but it isn’t when you consider the size of the state. The population of California in the last census was 37,254,503, and that means that the electoral votes per capita in California are a lot less. To put it another way, the three electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each. The 55 electors in California represent an average of 677,355 each, and that’s a disparity of 3.6 to 1.

This has to change. Each resident of the United States should have the same voting power. The simplest way to achieve this is to abolish the Electoral College and insist that everyone’s vote stand on its own. That would constitute true electoral reform. You can call our current anachronistic system many things, but you can’t call it a democracy.

Source : https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-the-electoral-college_b_12891764

From 2017 but doubt things have improved since and likely worsened.

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