A new national public opinion survey by Gallup finds 58 percent of respondents favor replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote to 39 opposed, consistent with a Pew Center survey finding, also from this week, putting the split at 63 to 35 percent pro-popular vote to pro-Electoral College, respectively. Gallup since 2000 and Pew since 2017 have asked the question every few years and both have consistently found Team PV in within a few points of 60 percent and Team EC around 35 percent… Except for 2016 when the Electoral College suddenly got a little more popular.

The answer why is painfully obvious. In late November 2016 Gallup found just a two-point lead for Team Popular Vote at 49 to 47 percent. In 2017 CNN found it at 51 to 44 percent PV to EC. The same year Pew found it at 55 percent pro-Popular Vote to 41 percent Electoral College. In 2020 the topline numbers began to creep back up to normal range for Gallup as they found a 61 to 38 percent split while Pew found a nearly-identical 60 percent pro-popular vote to 37 percent. Gallup didn’t run it in 2021, but Pew did and found another sudden, albeit smaller, spike for the Electoral College – 43 percent to 55 percent – possibly because certain voters realized they fell just about about 44,000 votes across three states from their desired outcome in the prior presidential election.

Also obvious is the partisan makeup, as this year Gallup found 82 percent of Dem respondents on Team Popular Vote to 66 percent of GOP respondents on Team Electoral College, while Pew puts it at 87 percent of liberal Dems saying they’re pro-PV versus 63 percent of pro-PV conservatives.

What’s not all that obvious but funny and open to reasonable speculation is why some of the edge came off of MAGA’s love for the Electoral College since 2016 while Dems have stayed much more consistently against it (also funny that despite the completely different partisan split, Gallup’s 2024 overall topline at 58 PV to 39 EC is effectively in the same spot as 2000’s 61 to 35 PV/EC).

If we had to hazard a guess it’s that Dems aren’t so forgiving of this travesty while Republicans are more likely to have goldfish memories, that the only reason they have a chance at capturing the White House is that they have this completely undeserved advantage, the importance of which only spiked somewhat after the 2016 and (to a lesser extent) the 2020 elections.

As for this year, it’s not like it’s no longer a problem for Democrats, but the New York Times’s Nate Cohn believes that, when the rubber meets the road, it’s becoming less so. Generally most political geeks assume that a Dem presidential candidate needs to take at least 4 percent of the national popular vote to prevail in the Electoral College. But Cohn writes that may not be the case:

Now if you want to believe this egghead, you might also want to start entertaining the (very slim, but real) possibility that Kamala Harris could actually lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College. It is really not impossible. The last national election, the 2022 House Midterms should tell you as much: Republicans took 54,227,992 votes to Dems’ 51,280,463 to flip a total of nine seats and win the majority. But Democrats came within fucking 6,675 votes of winning the majority.

If that happens it would suck for a Harris Administration because it would probably mean the Dems failed to flip the House or hang on to the Senate. But it would absolutely be poetic justice and would (hopefully) snap Republicans out of it, leading to the Electoral College’s abolition once and for all.

Barring that, we’ve got this:

Since Maine’s addition earlier this year, the National Popular Interstate Vote Compact is now stands at 209 votes – 61 shy – of the 270 required to kick in with Michigan (15 EC votes, has a Dem trifecta and could pass next week tomorrow if they wanted to), Pennsylvania (19), Nevada (6), Arizona (11), Virginia (13), and Wisconsin (10) theoretically gettable within the next decade. It’d be foolish to bet against this ad-hoc popular vote system being in place across the United States before 2040.

…assuming a hardcore MAGA Supreme Court doesn’t say “No, lol.”

If that hurdle could be cleared there would still be need for a far larger caution in this potential NPVIC regime over a bastardized Electoral College: Would you really trust hardcore MAGA states like Wyoming and Arkansas to be completely upfront and honest with their tabulations and continue to blithely count the Dem presidential ballots same as they did for however many elections now?

Joe Biden won 28,120,566 votes from Red States in 2020, just over a third of his popular vote share and well within the delta between him and Trump. You see where we’re going with this. We’re already in a world where Pennsylvania couldn’t certify their 2022 election statewide for more than a month and a half, when those canvasser scumbags nearly derailed it Wayne County, Michigan in 2020, and then again at the statewide level where that one Republican got death threats for voting to certify Biden’s win. Now take that and imagine that you would need to worry about that AND Mississippi, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, and so on so forth, pulling even worse bullshit. You would no joke probably need FEMA and/or the National Guard to administer a presidential election. Good fucking luck with getting the MAGA hicks to trust the result that year.

Not trying to be so dark about it or say the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact isn’t the right thing to do. It is. Just be aware of the practical dangers over the years as it moves closer to the finish line. Clearing the 270 vote threshold and the Supreme Court won’t be the hardest part.

That slog still might be preferable to watching this fat fucking loser demagoguing in Wisconsin – for the very reasons outlined above given our 18th century presidential election system:

Real subtle appeal to the whitest swing state with the “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” too.