Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and went home to New York a loser.
On Tuesday night, Democrats won the states they need to make sure it never happens again.
The workaround does not require a constitutional amendment.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact Could Cancel Your Vote in 2028
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been building quietly since 2006.
Under the plan, states award all their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote – regardless of how their own citizens voted.
The Founders gave states broad authority over how they assign their electors – and Democrats are using that provision against them.
From 1992 through 2020, Republicans won the national popular vote exactly once – George W. Bush in 2004.
Democrats won the popular vote in the other seven elections and still lost the White House twice.
The reason is California, New York, and Illinois.
Democrats run up enormous margins in those three states – margins that mean nothing under the Electoral College because those states are decided before Election Day.
Winning Los Angeles County by 2 million votes and losing Wisconsin by 20,000 produces the same result: zero extra electoral votes.
The compact flips that math.
Trump winning the national popular vote in 2024 was a gut punch Democrats never saw coming.
They are not letting that happen again.
The compact takes effect the moment states controlling 270 electoral votes sign on.
Right now, 18 states and Washington D.C. control 222 electoral votes inside the compact – just 48 short of the trigger.
Tuesday night, Democrats flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada – five battleground states representing 61 electoral votes, more than enough to push the compact past 270.
They didn't just flip Congress – they flipped the Electoral College.
Every network spent Tuesday night counting House seats and completely missed what Democrats actually walked away with.
They quietly won the statehouses that could make your presidential vote irrelevant by 2028.
Gavin Newsom – already positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run – called the Electoral College "perverted" and said he is open to packing the Supreme Court to finish the job.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes went on air to tell Democrats to "think big" and bulldoze the Electoral College while they had the chance.
They listened.
Why Democrats Are Not Worried About a Supreme Court Challenge
The media spent the week obsessing over House seat totals when the number that actually matters is governorships.
Democrats know the compact faces serious legal land mines.
The Heritage Foundation examined the compact in 2020 and concluded it is unconstitutional without congressional approval – calling it "misusing an interstate compact to bypass the Constitution."
The Congressional Research Service expects "significant litigation" if the compact takes effect, with the dispute possibly reaching the Supreme Court.
Democrats are not worried, because the compact was never meant to work alone.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley documented the full strategy in his new book Rage and the Republic.
The plan starts with packing the Supreme Court to install a liberal majority that greenlights the compact, then adds Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states – handing Democrats four new senators and locking in the Senate – and finishes by killing the filibuster so Republicans cannot block any of it.
Harvard professor Michael Klarman mapped out this exact playbook years before Tuesday – a strategy he said was designed to guarantee Republicans "will never win another election," and one he acknowledged the Supreme Court could strike down.
Packing the court eliminates that problem.
Democrats could not pull this off during Biden's presidency.
Now, with new governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada and a fresh congressional majority, the window is open.
How a National Popular Vote Hands California and New York the Presidency
The framers built the Electoral College to prevent massive population centers from permanently steamrolling smaller states.
Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, warned that democracies without those protections would become what he called "mobocracies."
Under a national popular vote, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho stop mattering in presidential elections – California and New York become the permanent architects of every White House for the rest of your lifetime.
The candidate who wins Los Angeles County and New York City wins the presidency, and every vote cast in a smaller state becomes noise.
Democrats know this and are counting on it.
That is why they ran on healthcare and "protecting democracy" – not on what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact actually does to votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Democrats won Tuesday without telling a single voter in a battleground state they were signing away that state's role in every future presidential election.
For the first time since the compact launched in 2006, they have the state-level control to make it happen before 2028.
Sources:
- Jonathan Turley, "Midterms Empower Democrats to Target the Electoral College," Fox News, November 7, 2026.
- "Electoral College in Peril as Blue Wave Pushes Popular Vote Compact Past 270 Threshold," The Daily Signal/Heartlander News, November 2026.
- "The National Popular Vote: Misusing an Interstate Compact to Bypass the Constitution," Heritage Foundation, October 8, 2020.
- "Democrats Just Quietly Won the Power to Sideline the Electoral College by 2028," RedState, November 6, 2026.
- Larry O'Connor, "Democrats Are About to Throw Out the Electoral College Without Touching the Constitution," Townhall, November 5, 2026.
