Three years ago, I laid out five power grabs that Democrats would never stop pursuing. And they keep proving me right. Overhauling U.S. elections was on that list, and a key part of that was abolishing the Electoral College. If you thought that President Donald Trump’s national popular vote victory in the 2024 election would have given them pause to keep pursuing this, you were wrong.
This week, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who campaigned as a moderate, signed a bill adding her state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This legal workaround would effectively neuter the Electoral College without touching a single line of the Constitution.
Abolishing the Electoral College outright requires a constitutional amendment. Good luck getting that through. Democrats know it, too. Hence, the compact.
Here's how it works. Participating states agree that once enough states sign on to the compact, totaling 270 electoral votes, every member state will award all of its electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of how that state's own voters voted. Your vote for president in Virginia? Irrelevant. The guy California picked is getting Virginia's electoral votes anyway.
The compact now stands at 222 electoral votes, with another 45 pending. Assuming every pending state joins the compact, that puts the effort just 3 electoral votes short of the 270 threshold needed to kick in. That’s really, really, really close.
Now, I’m sure legal challenges will be filed, and the Supreme Court will most certainly decide the compact’s constitutionality, but it’s still scary how close this is to actually happening.
It’s ironic for a party that fancies itself the nation’s defender of democracy to advocate for a system where every single voter of a state would effectively be disenfranchised. Still, hey, that’s the Democrats for you.
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Honestly, they didn’t think this through. I ran the numbers. If every state in the compact today awarded its Electoral College votes to the national popular vote winner in 2024, this is how the election would have turned out:
This is what @SpanbergerForVA just signed into law in Virginia pic.twitter.com/qE2zv43KQ1
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) April 18, 2026
Call me crazy, but I see a lot of blue states that wouldn’t be very happy. Heck, imagine for a moment that the compact is in place, and a Republican wins the national popular vote but loses the Electoral College. Does anyone really believe that deep blue states would honor the compact in that case?
The party that spent years insisting the 2016 election was stolen, that pushed two impeachments, wants to make DC and Puerto Rico states, pack the Supreme Court, and has engineered every possible procedural maneuver to undermine Trump’s presidency—are they going to cheerfully hand their electoral votes to a Republican because a compact says so?
Democrats keep proving the same point, over and over. When they can't win by the rules, they change the rules. When they can't change the rules, they route around them. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact isn't a reform. It's a mechanism for control — and Virginia just handed them another 13 electoral votes toward making it a reality.
