bilateral
TopicsAbout← Back to feed
BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGApril 14, 2026

Virginia joins a national effort to ensure only popular vote winners become president

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation on April 14, 2026, adding Virginia to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), an agreement among states to award their presidential electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote. The Virginia Senate passed the bill by a narrow 21-19 vote on February 9, 2026, and Democratic Delegate Dan Helmer described the effort as at least a decade-long process in Virginia. Virginia becomes the 18th state plus D.C. to join the compact.

XLinkedInFacebookThreadsWhatsAppReddit

Virginia is joining a coalition to make the popular vote winner always become president—but does eliminating the Electoral College strengthen democracy or strip smaller states of meaningful power?

Not familiar with this story? Get context →
Popular vote losers winning presidency
L
Two elections in sixteen years produced presidents who lost the popular vote — by 540,000 votes in 2000 and 2.9 million in 2016. We do not accept this outcome in any other elected office in America. No governor wins by county-weighted college, no senator wins by township. The presidency alone operates on logic that routinely inverts what most Americans chose.
C
You're treating two data points as a systemic failure, but the Electoral College has produced a popular-vote winner in 52 of 58 presidential elections — that's a 90% alignment rate. More importantly, you're assuming the popular vote totals from those elections tell us what would have happened under different rules, but candidates don't campaign nationally under the current system, so we have no idea what the real national preference would have been had the game been played differently.
L
The '90% alignment' argument concedes that the system fails — it just argues it fails rarely enough to tolerate. And your point about different campaign strategies cuts both ways: under a national popular vote, a Republican competing in urban Texas and a Democrat competing in rural Georgia might shift those totals significantly, which is exactly the argument for changing the rules.
C
Exactly — we don't know what the totals would be, which is why claiming a mandate for the 'real national preference' is speculation dressed as math. You're proposing a permanent constitutional realignment based on two elections and a counterfactual.
State authority versus federalist design
L
The strongest version of the originalist objection is that the Founders deliberately rejected direct popular election at Philadelphia. But accepting that argument requires believing that Article II's grant of plenary state authority over elector appointment was meant to be permanently frozen — when in fact it was written as a flexibility mechanism. Virginia isn't defying the Founders' design; it's using the exact lever they installed.
C
The lever they installed was for states to make independent judgments about how best to represent their own citizens — not to hand that judgment to voters in 49 other states. When Virginia binds its electors to the national popular vote, a Virginia voter's presidential preference is overridden the moment more people elsewhere disagree. That's not flexibility; it's a state legislature voting to make its own citizens' votes conditional on what the rest of the country does.
L
Virginia's legislature decided its citizens are best represented when the candidate most Americans prefer wins — that's a legitimate democratic judgment about what representation means, not a surrender of sovereignty. Wyoming already 'overrides' Virginia voters in the other direction by carrying three electoral votes on 580,000 people.
C
Wyoming's weight is baked into the constitutional structure both states agreed to; Virginia unilaterally rewriting that structure through a compact is a fundamentally different act, and conflating the two hides the actual constitutional question.
Compact Clause legal vulnerability
L
The Compact Clause challenge is the legally serious objection — not the originalist one. But the Supreme Court has consistently held that congressional approval is only required when a compact encroaches on federal supremacy or shifts power away from non-member states in ways that disadvantage them. The NPVIC does neither: member states use their own electors under their own authority, and no non-member state loses any of its own electoral votes.
C
You're describing the most favorable possible reading of doctrine that has never been applied to anything like this. No court has reviewed the NPVIC, which means you're asking Virginia to make a consequential constitutional bet on legal theory rather than precedent. If the compact reaches 270 electoral votes, triggers a presidential outcome, and is then struck down by the Supreme Court, the legitimacy crisis that follows would be catastrophically worse than anything the current system has produced.
L
Every constitutional innovation is legal theory until it's precedent — that's how constitutional law works. The more honest version of your argument is that you'd prefer the Court strike it down, which is why the 21-19 party-line vote in Virginia tells us something about whose legal uncertainty is sincere.
C
A party-line vote doesn't invalidate a legal objection — it confirms that one party is willing to gamble on an unresolved constitutional question for electoral advantage, and then call the other side's concern about that gamble 'insincere.'
Swing state concentration versus small state protection
L
The current system doesn't protect small states — it makes 44 of them irrelevant. Presidential campaigns spend billions in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin while Texas, California, New York, and Illinois watch from the sideline. Under a national popular vote, every marginal vote matters everywhere: a Democrat competes in rural Georgia, a Republican competes in urban Texas. The Electoral College doesn't elevate small states; it enshrines six states as the only places presidents are actually won.
C
You're right that winner-take-all produces swing-state concentration, but that's an argument against winner-take-all allocation, not against the Electoral College itself — states like Maine and Nebraska already use proportional allocation. The NPVIC doesn't fix that dynamic; it replaces one concentration problem with another, shifting all campaign energy to high-population media markets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, where marginal vote totals are largest.
L
That's a prediction about campaign behavior, not a structural argument — and it assumes campaigns wouldn't pursue marginal votes in lower-cost markets where persuasion is cheaper. More importantly, the current system's concentration isn't a prediction; it's documented reality in every election cycle.
C
Documented reality in a system candidates optimize for — change the system and you change the optimization, which is precisely why projecting current behavior onto new rules is the weakest form of this argument.
Coalition legitimacy of the compact
L
Colorado joined the NPVIC in 2019 and its voters ratified that choice by referendum in 2020 — a state that went Obama, then Trump, then Biden. Describing this compact as a partisan coastal scheme requires ignoring that a genuine swing state put it to a popular vote and chose it. That is a coalition, not a conspiracy.
C
Colorado is one state, and the referendum passed 52-48 in a presidential election year with maximum Democratic turnout. The coalition you're describing has produced zero Republican legislative support — in Virginia it passed 21-19 with every Republican voting no. A constitutional restructuring of how presidents are elected that cannot attract a single vote from the party that currently benefits from the status quo is not a bipartisan reform; it's a partisan project with a good marketing line.
L
The party that benefits from a system opposing reform to that system is not evidence the reform is partisan — it's evidence the current system is. Asking Republicans to vote against their own structural advantage is not a reasonable threshold for legitimacy.
C
By that logic, any majority can rewrite electoral rules in its own interest and call objections self-serving — which is exactly the kind of unchecked majoritarian power that structural constraints on democracy are designed to prevent.
Conservative's hardest question
Liberal's hardest question
The Compact Clause constitutional challenge is genuinely unresolved — no court has ruled on whether the NPVIC requires congressional approval, and if the Supreme Court strikes it down after it reaches 270 electoral votes, it would create a legitimacy crisis worse than the current system's flaws. The argument that this is legally settled rests on legal theory, not precedent, and the lack of bipartisan support — a 21-19 Virginia Senate vote, all Republican opposition — makes a future court challenge both likely and politically combustible.
Both sides agree: Both sides agree that the Electoral College system produces outcomes where a candidate can win the presidency while losing the national popular vote, and that this has happened in recent elections (2000, 2016) with real political consequences.
The real conflict: They disagree about whether the Founders' design was deliberately restrictive (conservatives: the Electoral College was a deliberate rejection of popular vote) or deliberately flexible (liberals: Article II, Section 1 granted states plenary discretion precisely to enable democratic experimentation), and this disagreement is fundamentally historical and interpretive, not empirical.
What nobody has answered: If a state joins the NPVIC, reaches 270 electoral votes collectively, but then in a presidential election cycle discovers that binding its electors to the national popular vote winner will produce an outcome its legislature now opposes, what prevents that state from simply withdrawing or refusing to certify — and if courts enforce the compact against that state, on what legal theory do they do so without effectively rewriting the contract terms?
Sources

More debates