Popular vote would help, not hurt Republican Party
The instinctive conservative resistance to electing the presidency by a national popular vote seems rooted in a lack of self-confidence.
If the political right’s ideas and policies are right for the country then selling them to voters under a national popular vote election should embolden, rather than threaten, Republicans. Yet, some conservatives are skeptical of the idea.
I would encourage them to look at Canada, where the Conservative Party got more votes than any other party in the last federal general election but still lost. If a right-of-center party can win the popular vote in Canada then certainly American conservatives can find a path to victory under the national popular vote.
I understand the skepticism given that Republicans have in recent years lost the popular vote but won the election. Though as President Donald Trump himself has remarked, his 2016 campaign would have been run differently were he pursuing votes nationwide.
Much of the criticism of a national popular vote seems rooted in the idea that smaller states will be ignored. This is already happening, however. Elections are won or lost based on results in a small number of key battleground states. Trump didn’t compete outside of these states, which is why Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote but lost the election.
Simply put, every single political officeholder in the United States is elected by winning the most votes, with the exception of one: The president. With a majority of governors, a majority of state legislatures, and a majority of state congressional delegations, conservatives have clearly done well under these circumstances.
Having studied and explored political systems around the world, I was intrigued to learn how easy it would be to implement a national popular vote for American presidential elections. And unlike the progressive fantasy expressed by Democratic presidential candidates it doesn’t involve abolishing the Electoral College.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a statebased reform that, while bipartisan, is inherently conservative and fully consistent with the framers of the Constitution, who gave the sole authority for selecting the method of allocating electoral votes to state legislatures. Importantly, this reform also preserves state control of elections.
The compact, which has been adopted by 16 states and the District of Columbia, simply awards a state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
Presidential elections under the compact would make every voter in every state — rather than just those living in battleground states — relevant. This also keep chaos and irregularities in a single county — say Michigan’s Antrim County or Georgia’s Fulton County — from deciding the outcome.
By running up the Republican margin of victory in deeply Republican ‘red’ states and also giving GOP voters in deeply Democratic ‘blue’ states a reason to vote, the Democratic advantage perceived by many conservatives would be eliminated. By contrast, right now, millions of conservative voters have little reason to show up because they know their votes are irrelevant.
The United States remains a right-of-center country. If conservatives compete, they can and will win the national popular vote.