There’s a certain kind of poker player who, after losing a few hands, doesn’t study the game — they try to swap out the deck. That’s the Democrat Party’s approach to presidential elections in a nutshell. For two decades now, they’ve been quietly assembling a scheme to neutralize the Electoral College, and this week, they added another chip to the pile.
What they didn’t count on is that the whole thing might blow up in their faces.
On Monday, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill making the Commonwealth the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The agreement is straightforward, if audacious: member states pledge to award their electoral votes not to the candidate their own voters chose, but to whoever wins the national popular vote. With Virginia on board, the compact now controls 222 electoral votes — just 48 short of the 270 needed to effectively decide a presidential election.
The compact doesn’t activate until it hits that magic number, so for now, it’s a loaded gun sitting on the table. And Democrats are betting they’ll be the ones pulling the trigger.
The scheme that could backfire
Here’s the part Democrats really don’t like to talk about. The entire project was born from a simple grievance: the last two presidents who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote were Republicans — George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. Democrats assumed they owned the popular vote permanently.
Then 2024 happened. Trump won both.
From Fox News opinion columnist David Marcus:
So, for example, had this compact been complete and in place in the 2024 presidential election, Virginia, which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, would have sent its 13 electoral votes to popular vote winner Donald Trump instead… This compact isn’t just a solution in search of a problem, which would be bad enough. It is, in fact, a naked power grab meant to ensure that Democrats win presidential elections, not to make them more fair.
The very mechanism Democrats spent twenty years constructing would have handed their own state’s electoral votes to the man they built it to stop. You genuinely cannot write comedy this good.
Bigger than bad political math
But the problems run deeper than irony. Under this system, a state that enforces voter ID, maintains clean voter rolls, and limits mail-in ballots would see its electoral votes determined by results from states that do none of those things. Your state’s standards become meaningless if California’s count swamps them.
And let’s talk about the Constitution for a moment. Legal scholars have pointed out that the framers explicitly rejected popular election of the president. Every major expansion of voting rights in American history — women’s suffrage, the elimination of poll taxes, lowering the voting age — required a constitutional amendment. So remind me, when exactly did we decide the amendment process was optional?
Here’s what really gets me
There’s another wrinkle Democrats would rather you not notice. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, only Texas and Florida — both reliably red — are projected to gain electoral votes after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York are hemorrhaging population as Americans flee to lower-tax states with more freedom and fewer regulations.
So the compact starts to look less like democratic reform and more like a preemptive strike — an attempt to neutralize red-state gains before they even take effect. Pair it with Virginia’s simultaneous push to gerrymander its congressional map from a 6-5 Democratic edge to a staggering 10-1 advantage in a state that’s roughly 50/50. Subtle, right?
I’ve watched this playbook long enough to recognize the pattern. When Democrats can’t win under the existing rules, they don’t rethink their ideas. They rewrite the rules. Every single time.
The Electoral College has served this republic for 250 years. It forces candidates to build broad coalitions across diverse regions instead of running up the score in coastal cities. Call me old-fashioned, but a system that’s held together the longest-running representative democracy in world history doesn’t need fixing because one party had a rough couple of decades.
Maybe instead of rewriting the deck, they should learn to play the hand.
Key Takeaways
- Virginia became the 18th state to join a compact that could effectively bypass the Electoral College.
- The compact would have backfired in 2024, sending Virginia’s electoral votes to Trump.
- The scheme bypasses the constitutional amendment process and undermines state election integrity laws.
- Blue states are losing population and electoral votes — this is a preemptive power grab, not reform.
