National Popular Vote would be popular folly

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It's hardly surprising that triumphalist DFLers running the show, and the table, in this year's legislative session are poised to enlist Minnesota in a scheme to alter the U.S. Constitution — without the inconvenience of the constitutional amendment process.

With DFL majorities indulging nearly every iconoclastic impulse to erupt from the volcanic progressivism of recent years, signing Minnesota onto the National Popular Vote Compact, a fashionable liberal enthusiasm for decades, seems almost inevitable.

But Minnesotans should take note. Even if one believes that effectively doing away with the Electoral College would improve American democracy overall (and that should be a sizable "if"), doing so would certainly reduce the political clout of Minnesota voters and the weight of the state's interests in Washington.

The Compact plan is undeniably ingenious. It emerged after the contested presidential election of 2000, when Republican George W. Bush was awarded a narrow Electoral College majority over Democrat Al Gore despite losing the nationwide popular vote by one-half of 1 percentage point.

Democrats were understandably (and characteristically) outraged. The Compact idea soon arose among law professors as a way governments in a limited number of like-minded states could nullify the offending Electoral College system, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for the election of American presidents.

Reaching agreement on such a Compact is far more feasible than abolishing the College through a constitutional amendment, which would require approval from three-fourths of the states.

Under the Compact, each state that joins up would agree to award all its electoral votes in a presidential election to the winner of the popular vote across the nation — regardless of the outcome within that state's own boundaries. But the Compact would take effect only when the combined electoral votes of the signatory states reached at least 270 (in theory as few as 11 large states) — a majority that would elect a candidate president.

In effect, the Compact would transform American presidential elections into pure nationwide popular-vote contests, entirely through ordinary state-level legislation.

But pulling off this shrewd constitutional alchemy hasn't proved easy, even though Donald Trump's 2016 election despite losing the popular vote more decisively than Bush did inflamed Electoral College critics still more. To date only 15 states (and the District of Columbia) have joined the NPV Compact. They control 195 electoral votes, still well short of the 270 needed.

Minnesota's 10 electoral votes may soon enlarge the total. Both houses of the Legislature, on party-line votes, have this session passed versions of the Compact legislation.

Is this a good idea — for America? For Minnesota?

As I've noted before, the Electoral College system could use reform. Its overrepresentation of smaller states could be eliminated without undermining its essential function in our era (which is different in many ways from its original purpose). Its valuable modern function is to maintain presidential elections as, in fact, 50 separate state elections. Today, 48 of 50 states bestow all their electoral votes on the winner of their individual statewide tallies.

Critics of this system seldom feel any need to explain their certainty that a nationwide popular vote should instead be seen as the supremely legitimate way to measure the will of the American people. Fact is, from our republic's birth, the many designers of American institutions and processes for electing officials and resolving public issues have never found a single type of question they judged would best be submitted to a nationwide popular vote. That's not the kind of nation we are.

The challenge for America has always been to govern a hugely varied population — crowded in pulsating cites and spread across lonesome frontiers. To balance such spacious differences in interests and sensibilities, political representation can't be based solely on head counts. It has to recognize that rights and autonomy belong not only to individuals but also to communities of place, belief and walk of life.

All geographic political districting — for Congress, legislatures, city councils, etc. — reflects this understanding that communities count, denying total power to aggregated at-large majorities.

The Electoral College, by giving each state, as an autonomous political community, a role in choosing presidents, forces presidents and would-be presidents to concern themselves with diverse concerns across America. They must win in separate states, not just run up vote totals. Under a nationwide popular vote system, piling up margins in a few populous and ideologically monolithic regions would become the chief preoccupation of presidential politics.

And what of Minnesota? Well, there's a reason nearly every state (all except Nebraska and Maine) has chosen to allocate its electoral votes by the winner-take-all method. Each state becomes more important that way.

Under the winner-take-all method, a candidate gains 10 electoral votes by winning within Minnesota's boundaries. This makes Minnesota count more than it would under a system in which the nationwide popular vote was all-decisive.

Case in point: the 2020 election. Joe Biden carried Minnesota over Donald Trump by just over 233,000 votes. He won the nationwide popular vote by just over 7 million votes. Biden was elected with 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232, a margin of 74.

Do the math. Minnesota's 10 electoral votes made up 13.5% of Biden's critical electoral-vote margin. By contrast, the state's 233,000 popular-vote margin in Biden's favor made up just 3.3% of his national popular-vote margin.

Under which system would the concerns of Minnesota voters loom larger?

Another curiosity worth noting is that, had Minnesota been enrolled in a National Popular Vote Compact for the past half-century or so, the state's electoral votes would have been awarded five times to candidates who lost the popular vote within the state. It would have happened in 1968, 1980, 1984, 1988 and 2004.

It's true that the outcome in none of those elections would have been changed by an NPV Compact being in place. It wouldn't have mattered, really, if Minnesota's electoral votes had gone to Richard Nixon in 1968 instead of to Hubert Humphrey, and to Ronald Reagan in 1984 instead of to Walter Mondale. But it might have annoyed some Minnesota voters.

And how much more annoyed would such voters be if some day it did matter? The ultimate purpose of the NPV Compact is to prevent a candidate who wins the national popular vote from ever losing in the Electoral College (it's happened five times in U.S. history). Yet if NPV ever "worked" that way, and the majority of voters in Compact State X, who preferred Candidate Jones, found that their hijacked electoral votes put Candidate Smith in the White House instead — how long would that state remain in the Compact? Each state would be free to withdraw from the system through ordinary legislation.

The NPV Compact could in this way introduce unprecedented instability and uncertainty into America's basic political processes. And there would be legal struggles too, as the Constitution restricts states' ability to form compacts without congressional approval.

With luck, enough state governments will have the political and emotional balance to ensure that this trendy mistake is never actually consummated. It's a shame Minnesota's doesn't seem to be among them.