The National Popular Vote Compact isn’t reform, it’s an obvious coordinated end-run around the Constitution that strips states, and their citizens, of their last real power.
When Virginia’s chameleon governor, Abigail Spanberger, allied the Commonwealth with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) on April 13th, she fired a shot which may be the last in the long-running battle to strip states of their remaining independent power.
Consider the trajectory. The Commerce Clause has been beaten like a rented mule until it either means nothing or covers everything — depending on who’s doing the interpreting. The 17th Amendment nationalized Senate elections, stripping state legislatures and governors of their ability to protect state interests within the federal government. Now this compact threatens to remove the last meaningful vestige of significant state power by negating the Electoral College.
I seem to remember on September 9, 2021, during the rollout of the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate, Stephanie Ruhle described using OSHA authority as “the ultimate workaround for the federal government to require vaccinations”, and Ron Klain, Biden’s White House handler, lovingly retweeted it, indicating that was exactly what the Biden cabal had in mind.
Let’s be frank, Democrat strategy has long included affection for such “workarounds.”
The NPVIC has the feel of a workaround precisely because it is one. The Constitution did not create a national plebiscite for president; it created a federal system in which states, as political units, select electors. Yes, Article II gives state legislatures authority over the manner of appointing electors, but that authority exists within a constitutional structure, not outside of it. The compact attempts to convert a state-based system into a de facto national election without using the one mechanism the Constitution provides for structural change: amendment. That alone should raise a red flag.
In my unscholarly constitutional scholarship, I believe the Compact Clause sharpens the problem. Article I, Section 10 is explicit: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress… enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” States are barred from entering agreements that alter the balance of power without congressional consent. This is not a trivial administrative pact about shared resources or border disputes — it is a coordinated effort by multiple states to determine the outcome of a federal election by acting in concert. That is exactly the kind of collective action the Compact Clause was designed to restrain. Calling it a mere exercise of state authority ignores the fact that it only functions because states are binding themselves together to produce a national effect.
The National Popular Vote Compact has never survived judicial scrutiny, largely because it has never actually faced it. I’m frankly amazed it hasn’t been directly challenged in court already because it literally is a compact between states without Congressional approval.
There is also a more fundamental issue of representation. Under the compact, a state can be compelled to award its electors to a candidate rejected by a clear majority of its own voters. That isn’t just politically awkward — it cuts against the basic republican premise that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed within their jurisdiction. Winner-take-all systems already compress minority votes, but they still reflect the will of the state’s electorate. The NPVIC severs that connection entirely, subordinating a state’s voters to the aggregate preferences of other states.
The NPVIC looks less like a faithful use of constitutional flexibility and more like an attempt to bypass constitutional design. If the country wants a national popular vote for president, the Constitution provides a legitimate path to get there. What the compact offers instead is a clever but strained reinterpretation that achieves the same result while sidestepping the discipline of amendment. That may be politically expedient, but constitutionally, it sits on far shakier ground than its advocates admit.
Democrats have wanted to scrap the Electoral College every time they lose a presidential election, denouncing it as an “undemocratic anachronism.” If you ignore the Constitution, they technically have a point on the first charge, but I’d argue “undemocratic” is actually a feature, not a bug — because America is not a democracy. The official name of our country is the United States of America for a reason: we are a union of independent states, a representative Republic, not a direct national democracy. The Electoral College supports the Jeffersonian vision of state supremacy over the Hamiltonian central government.
Nor do I agree it’s an anachronism. If the EC seems at odds with conventional wisdom, that’s not the fault of the Electoral College itself, it’s that the Constitution has been incrementally altered to weaken the states and transfer power to Washington that the Founders never intended.
The 2016 election illustrated the EC’s purpose perfectly. Hillary Clinton’s 2.6-million popular vote margin was almost entirely the product of one state — California, where she beat Trump by over 4 million votes. Without the Electoral College, the presidency would effectively be decided by California and New York. The EC prevents that concentration of national power in a handful of dense urban centers.
It’s also intellectually dishonest to claim that the candidate with the most popular votes has some inherent claim to the presidency. The 2016 campaign — like every campaign before it — was waged at the state level, with candidates focused on winning electoral votes in competitive states. It was not a national popular vote campaign. To extrapolate those results into what would have happened under a different system is simply wrong. We don’t know what the outcome would have been, and anyone claiming the national popular vote has inherent validity is just playing partisan politics, and not doing it very well.
Abolishing the Electoral College is another step toward converting the individual states from sovereign political entities into mere administrative districts — units that exist primarily to distribute federal funds while their governments serve no meaningful independent purpose. The 17th Amendment started that process with the Senate. Eliminating the EC would complete it.
In the end, dismantling the Electoral College may be the final step in transforming the United States of America into something resembling the Panem of the Hunger Games — a collection of dependent districts wholly subordinate to the Capitol.
Michael Smith is the prolific author of the Substack Unlicensed Punditry.