National Popular Vote Makes Flyover Country Irrelevant

Every time Democrats lose, they want to change the rules to make sure they don't lose again. So, ever since the 2016 election they have been kvetching about scrapping the electoral college and moving to the National Popular Vote to choose the president. Even

some Republicans are endorsing this truly dreadful idea. It would overturn our Founding Fathers’ brilliant design of an election system based on federalism – with the power residing where it belongs – with the states.

It is simple math that with a national popular vote, the president would essentially be elected by about a dozen highly populated states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, New Jersey, and Virginia. Small states would become irrelevant. Their voices would be unheard in presidential elections observed our friend Stephen Moore in the weekend edition of his must read Committee to Unleash Prosperity Hotline.

Our friends at the Leadership Institute have done a great public service in calculating which states would lose 20% or more of their political power under National Popular Vote schemes. Six small states would lose more than 50% of their influence in choosing the president and vice president.

In support of the National Popular Vote State Compact, some states have already passed laws awarding all their electoral votes to the U.S. presidential candidate who wins a national plurality of the popular vote. This bad idea would be constitutional because Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution gives the respective state legislatures the right to appoint presidential electors. Congressional approval isn’t required. The Compact would take effect if states with a majority of the electoral votes pass it.

Proponents of the NPV plan are now making a push to persuade state legislators to enact it, arguing that polls show Americans favor electing our presidents by popular votes rather than electoral votes determined by each state. What proponents don’t mention is that 31 states would lose power in presidential elections under this plan. Nineteen states would lose more than 20% of their power, and ten states would lose more than 40% of their power.

The accompanying table shows the biggest losers of presidential election influence:

Note, said Steve Moore, that many of these small states that lose power are blue states. So this isn’t a partisan issue. Anyone who lives in one of these 18 states and wants a National Popular Vote should have their head examined.

As Morton C. Blackwell, President of the Leadership Institute, and the Virginia Republican National Committeeman, explained in the study analyzing the shift in electoral influence, in many ways, the constitutional separation of powers between the states and the federal government is being eroded. The Founders never intended that the states should become merely administrative appendages of the federal government, much less that the United States become a unitary, centralized, plebiscitary democracy. NPV would push America along that dangerous and originally unintended path.

NPV would also greatly incentivize vote‐stealing because big‐city political machines would realize that massive numbers of fraudulent votes they could engender could swing the electoral votes beyond their states and be counted toward a national popular vote plurality victory for their presidential candidate.

Although Far Left states including Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have already passed it there are many reasons, including preserving federalism, why conservatives should oppose national popular vote.

• Electoral College

• national popular vote

• federalism

• small states

• National Popular Vote State Compact

• separation of powers

• election fraud