The Dems are playing with fire, and it might be a pleasure to see it burn them.
Everyone’s favorite moderate Trotskyite, Abigail Spanberger, signed legislation adding Virginia to the Electoral College Compact, so she is now free to focus on other goals, like securing passage of the dog-walking tax now pending in her Democrat-dominated legislature.
Surprisingly, I might be more amenable to the Compact than the dog-walking tax.
Spanberger and her moderate comrades are well versed in dialectical materialism as the driving force in history, but their knowledge of history does not extend to dry statistics from presidential electoral results. The disparity between Electoral College and the popular vote results that has seemed to favor the GOP in the last three elections is a product of the Trump era, which, barring intervention from QAnon Shaman & Co., ends in two years.
Nevertheless, an entire worldview and system of emotional industry has developed around the notion that the E.C. will continue to be more favorable to the GOP than popular vote results. In fact, history demonstrates that the relationship between the E.C. and the national popular vote is fluid and too difficult to predict. Post-Trump, we are as likely to get a GOP candidate winning the popular vote but losing the E.C. as vice versa.
Here, pre-Trump history is instructive. In 2004, George W. Bush won the national popular vote by 2.46 percent and pivotal Ohio by 2.1 percent. Therefore, moving the needle by 2.2 points to John Kerry across the board state-by-state would have left Bush still winning the national popular vote but losing Ohio and the E.C.
In 2012, Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.86 points over Mitt Romney. Moving the needle by 4 points to Romney would have given him the popular vote and Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, but Obama would have won an E.C. majority with 272 votes. Hence, the E.C. dynamic favored the Democrats in these two elections.
The seeming E.C. advantage for the GOP in the three most recent presidential elections is a product of outsized Democrat margins in California and New York. These margins may be a function of revulsion to Trump and thus ephemeral.
In fact, between 2020 and 2024, the Democrat margins were reduced by 9.0 points in California and 10.5 points in New York, while the overall national shift to the GOP was only 5.9 points. The size of the GOP E.C. advantage was correspondingly reduced, as Trump probably would have won the E.C. with about a 4-point national popular vote loss in 2020 but would have lost the E.C. with anything worse than about a half-point popular vote loss in 2024. Hence, what the Democrat supporters of the Compact believe to be permanent is already shifting.
Of course, popular vote statistics from elections in which the candidates were not seeking to win the national popular vote may not be instructive of anything. The shift in the numbers from California and New York may reflect that the GOP might be aided in terms of the popular vote more than the Democrats in a theoretical post-Compact election in which the popular vote is the objective.
American Thinker | Jonathan F. Mack
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