The most votes should be good enough

Let’s plot out a possible scenario for the 2024 election. Say Donald Trump runs again, as he has hinted at. Connecticut would likely vote against him for a third time, possibly by a significant margin. Thanks to a law signed by former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2018, the state could award its seven electoral votes to him anyway.

It’s not likely, but not impossible, either.

It’s been 32 years since Connecticut went red in a presidential election. In 1988, which saw George H.W. Bush win his only term in the White House, the election was a rout in both the popular vote and Electoral College, but it’s instructive to look back and see how much can change in a generation. Not only did Connecticut vote Republican, so did California. West Virginia, which today is possibly the reddest state in the union, was one of only 10 nationwide to support Michael Dukakis.

Like most of American history, the result in the Electoral College closely matched the nationwide popular vote, which led many people to think of it as almost a formality. Twelve years later, those results diverged for the first time in more than a century, which got some people thinking that maybe a 200-yearold compromise that favored certain voters in specific locations over others was less than ideal.

Eliminating the Electoral College, which is scheduled to officially vote on Monday, would require changing the Constitution, and isn’t likely to happen. The solution some states, including

Connecticut, have taken up instead is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This agreement would go into effect once states that total 270 electoral votes — the amount needed to win the election — sign on, and it would automatically assign every participating state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. That would guarantee, theoretically, that whoever wins the most votes nationally is allowed to be president.

Whether it would work in practice is another question. In the scenario outlined above, it’s easy to foresee some friction if Connecticut and other blue states were asked to assign electoral votes to a candidate their own voters soundly rejected. As for ’24, Trump has lost the national popular vote twice already and would be hard-pressed to win it next time around. Regardless, the idea of the compact is a sound one.

This is well-trod territory and it’s not worth rehashing every argument, but it’s undeniable under the current setup that only a small subset of states gets all the attention in a presidential race. If you live in a state that won’t be close on Election Day, no one cares about you. But there’s nothing inherently more important about a voter in Florida compared to one a few miles away in Alabama.

That leaves huge pockets of the country out of the equation. Probably no one is worse off under the present system than minority party voters in the biggest states. Trump won 6 million votes in California this year, and it helped him not even a little bit.

As to the idea that the Electoral College protects small states, there isn’t much sense in that, either. There’s no specific set of interests that binds together Rhode Island and Montana.

To date, only Democratic-leaning states have signed onto the popular vote compact (it’s up to 16 states representing 196 electoral votes), but this doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Consider Texas, which as recently as 2004 voted Republican by 20-plus points. This year the margin shrank to 5.5 percent. If Texas ever goes blue and Democrats have a hold on three of the four largest states in the nation, Republicans could see the popular vote as their best bet going forward.

The inevitable response to an argument like this is that we’re a nation made of states, and we shouldn’t toss aside our time-honored traditions. Sure. But we should also ask whether those traditions make sense 200 years later.

This one has outlived any usefulness it once had. The president should be whoever gets the most votes.