Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation entering her state into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, adding 13 electoral votes to a growing coalition of blue states that want to award the presidency to whoever wins the raw national vote count, regardless of how individual states vote.
With Virginia's entry, the compact now claims 18 states and the District of Columbia, totaling 222 electoral votes. That leaves the coalition 48 electors short of the 270 needed to trigger the agreement. If it ever reaches that threshold, every member state would hand its electors to the national popular vote winner, even if that state's own voters chose someone else.
The implications are not subtle. This is a partisan effort, advanced almost exclusively by Democrats, to neutralize the constitutional system the Founders designed to balance the interests of large and small states. And it is gaining ground.
The legislation passed the Virginia General Assembly largely along party lines, the Washington Examiner reported. Spanberger signed it on Monday. The move was not a bipartisan consensus. It was a Democratic priority, pushed through a Democrat-controlled legislature and signed by a Democratic governor.
The compact's mechanics are straightforward. Under it, Virginia agrees to award its electoral votes to the presidential ticket that receives the most popular votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, but only once states holding a combined 270 electoral votes have joined. Until then, the compact sits dormant.
John Koza, chairman of the organization National Popular Vote, framed the signing as part of a long campaign:
"We'll continue our state-by-state work until the candidate who wins the most popular votes is elected president and every voter is treated equally in every presidential election."
That language, "every voter treated equally", is the sales pitch. The reality is more complicated. The Electoral College already treats every voter equally within the constitutional framework. What the compact would do is redefine "equal" to mean that a voter in rural Virginia has her state's electors assigned based on turnout patterns in Los Angeles and New York City.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution gives each state the power to appoint electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct." Compact supporters lean on that clause to argue the arrangement is perfectly legal. States can assign electors however they choose, the argument goes, so why not assign them to the national popular vote winner?
But there is another clause compact advocates are less eager to discuss. Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 governs interstate compacts and requires states to gain the assent of Congress before entering into agreements that affect federal power. The compact would face intense legal scrutiny if it ever comes into force. And the question of whether a deal among states to collectively override their own voters' choices "infringes on federal power" is not a close call for many constitutional scholars.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent holds that states need congressional approval for a compact only if the agreement infringes on federal power. Supporters will argue the compact does not. Critics will argue that an agreement designed to change the outcome of presidential elections is the very definition of infringing on federal power. That fight would land in federal court within hours of the compact taking effect.
No legal challenge has been filed yet, because the compact has not yet reached the 270-elector threshold. But the absence of litigation is not evidence of legality. It is evidence that the compact has not yet mattered.
The advocacy group Stand Up America, whose executive director Christina Harvey praised the Virginia signing, made the political motivation plain. Harvey said:
"The presidency should be won by the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide, not just the right combination of battleground states."
Stand Up America also noted that two of the four U.S. presidents of the 21st century, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. That framing tells you everything about the compact's target audience: Democrats who believe the current system has cost them elections they should have won.
The states that have joined the compact are overwhelmingly blue. California, New York, and Illinois are among them. Legislation has also been introduced in swing states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but introduced is a long way from enacted, especially in states where voters might not appreciate having their electoral votes shipped to whichever candidate runs up the score in deep-blue urban centers.
The broader political context for Democrats heading into the 2026 midterms makes this push look less like principled reform and more like institutional maneuvering. When your party struggles to win under the existing rules, changing the rules becomes the priority.
The Virginia Republican Party did not mince words. Fox News reported that the state GOP said Spanberger signed a bill to render Virginians' vote for president "NULL AND VOID." Critics accused her of abandoning her centrist campaign message to advance far-left policies.
That charge carries weight. Spanberger built her political career as a moderate, a former CIA officer who won a swing district by running to the center. Now, as governor, she is signing legislation that would override the will of Virginia's own voters if those voters pick the candidate who loses the national popular vote. That is not centrism. That is a party-line priority dressed in democratic language.
The earlier legislative history in Virginia underscores the partisan nature of the effort. When the Virginia House of Delegates passed a version of the compact bill years ago, the vote was 51, 46, a near-perfect party-line split. This was never a bipartisan reform movement. It was a Democratic project from the start.
Spanberger's trajectory mirrors a pattern of Democrats who campaign as moderates and govern as progressives, a disconnect that even some voices within the party have flagged as a problem.
The compact needs 48 more electoral votes to take effect. That means its backers need to flip several more states, and not just safely blue ones. The swing states where legislation has been introduced (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) are precisely the states where voters are most likely to resist the idea. These are battleground states because their voters are closely divided. Telling those voters that their state's electors might go to the candidate they voted against is a tough sell.
A 2024 Pew Research Center poll showed that 63% of Americans said they would replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote, while 35% opposed the change. Compact supporters cite that number as proof of broad support. But polling on abstract constitutional questions is notoriously unreliable. Ask people whether they want "every vote to count equally" and most will say yes. Ask them whether Virginia's electors should go to the candidate California preferred, and the numbers shift.
The compact's proponents also note that in 60 presidential elections in U.S. history, 10 were "near misses" in which a small number of votes in a few states could have tipped the Electoral College toward the candidate who lost the popular vote. That statistic is meant to suggest the system is fragile. But it could just as easily suggest the system is working, forcing candidates to build broad coalitions across diverse states rather than running up margins in a handful of population centers.
The Democratic Party's broader governing agenda has increasingly focused on structural changes to election rules, from this compact to court-packing proposals to voting-law overhauls. The pattern is consistent: when the existing system produces outcomes Democrats dislike, the system itself becomes the enemy.
The Electoral College was not an accident. It was a deliberate design choice by framers who understood that a pure popular vote would allow a few densely populated regions to dominate the rest of the country. The system forces presidential candidates to compete in a geographically diverse set of states. It gives smaller states a voice they would lose under a straight popular vote.
None of that means the Electoral College is beyond criticism. But the proper way to change it is through the constitutional amendment process, not through an interstate workaround designed to achieve the same result without the supermajority consensus the Founders required for structural changes. The compact is an end-run, and its backers know it.
Christina Harvey of Stand Up America said the Virginia signing brings the country "one step closer to a system where Americans' votes for president and vice-president count equally, no matter where they live." That sounds appealing. But what it means in practice is that a voter in Wyoming would have her state's three electoral votes assigned based on vote totals driven overwhelmingly by California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
That is not equality. That is consolidation of power, dressed up in the language of fairness.
The growing disconnect between Democratic leaders and their own voters on a range of issues suggests this kind of top-down structural engineering may not play as well outside blue-state capitals as its architects assume.
The compact sits at 222 electoral votes. It needs 270. The gap is real, and closing it requires winning over states where the politics are far less friendly. Legal challenges are all but guaranteed if the threshold is ever reached. And Congress, which the Constitution appears to require to approve such a compact, has shown no appetite for doing so.
But the trend line matters. Every state that joins normalizes the idea. Every signing ceremony generates headlines about "momentum." And every year that passes without a legal challenge to the compact's structure allows its backers to build political infrastructure in new states.
Voters in the states being courted by compact organizers should understand exactly what they are being asked to accept: that their state's electors would be assigned not by their own votes, but by a national tally dominated by states that may share none of their values, priorities, or interests.
The Founders built the Electoral College to prevent exactly that kind of concentration. Democrats are building the compact to achieve it. The difference between those two projects tells you everything you need to know about who trusts the American system, and who wants to replace it.
