While pratfalling toward her redistricting disaster, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger affixed her signature to an idea that, if in effect in 2024, would likely have given Donald Trump the greatest Electoral College victory since George Washington—one vote short of Washington’s unanimous victories. The bill that Spanberger signed adds Virginia to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)—one of the most harebrained public policy ideas of a notoriously harebrained era.
The legal effect would have been nil—Trump would not have been any more president than he is now. But Democrats would have been treated to four years of “Most-Popular-Since-Washington” crowing by Trump and his coterie. Election 2024 would have become a gigantic cake, baked by Democrats, and festooned with 537 red candles and 1 pathetic blue candle. For Trump and his allies, the cherry atop the cake would have been the legions of Democratic office-holders facing turbo-charged Republican get-out-the-vote efforts in deep-blue states. As the saying goes, “Be careful what you ask for.”
WHAT, PRAY TELL, IS THIS NPVIC?
The NPVIC is a shaky scheme for circumventing the Electoral College and determining presidential elections by an ill-defined, highly-manipulable, easily-contested, fatally imprecise metric called “the national popular vote” (NPV). Short-sighted people, unaware of the concept of secondary effects, believe the NPVIC would have elected Al Gore over George Bush and Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump and that it will reliably favor Democrats over Republicans in future elections. A modest number of ill-informed Republicans also naively support the NPVIC on goo-goo (good government) grounds.
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