Jesse Wegman on Why We Should Let The People Pick The President

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. Welcome to Another Way, the podcast of Equal Citizens. I'm Jason Harrow, the director and chief counsel of the group. Today on our podcast, we bring you a great conversation that I had with Jesse Wegman. Jesse is the author of a terrific new book about changing the way we select the President, called Let the People Pick the President. As you'll hear, the thesis of his book is perfectly captured by the title, which is that the people should be picking the President. Of course we do now, but in a strange and distortive way that involves winner take all elections in states and use of the Electoral College, which doesn't weight every vote equally. You'll hear about why that's a problem. And in our conversation, we also talked a lot about the history of the college, including the history of framers who wanted a popular vote from the very beginning. This is a fascinating history that not many people know about. And we'll talk about the current status of reform in the states and in particular the status of something listeners may have heard about called the National Popular Vote Compact, which could be a way forward to. To reforming the way we select the President. Jesse is a member of the New York Times editorial board as well as being the author of this great new book. And at the Times, he writes about the Supreme Court and legal affairs. Before he worked at the Times, he's worked as a reporter, editor and producer at outlets including npr, the New York Observer, Reuters, Daily Beast, and Newsweek. He graduated from Law School from NYU in 2005. One note, this conversation was actually part of a wonderful discussion series that the folks at the Leadership Now Press Project put on. The Leadership Now Project is a fantastic member organization of people interested in democracy reform generally, and they do periodic briefings and events that promote this from a totally bipartisan, nonpartisan reform effort. They talk about gerrymandering, they talk about voting rights. It's a great group. If you want to check them out, leadershipnowproject.org that's leadershipnowproject.org thanks to them for hosting this great discussion. There will be more public discussions that

they are hosting if you go to

their website and you can contact them and find out about it. But for now, this was a great forum for it and the conversation went so well that we wanted to bring it to you. You can support this podcast, by the way, at equalcitizens us anotherway or patreon.com equalcitizens and now with that out of the way, I bring you my conversation with Jesse Wegman.

Okay, so let's start at the beginning, Jesse. And I want to start with a little bit of the history of the Electoral College and the way we select the president because it's something people just, you know, we know we have an Electoral College, but a lot of people are probably wondering how we got there and in terms of setting us up, how we got there. I want you to start by telling us a little bit about the man that I now know to be your favorite constitutional framer, and that is not Madison, not Thomas Jefferson, not George Washington, but James Wilson, who many people on this call may not have heard of. So tell us about Wilson's conception of how we should select a president and tell us about why he lost.

Sure. James Wilson is a fascinating figure for many reasons, in the founding of the country. And what struck me most in beginning to research this book, which I started a few years ago, was that I had never heard of him and that many people I know who are smarter than I am and more well read in American history, also hadn't heard of him. And that's an astonishing thing. James Wilson was by all accounts the most important framer at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. You know, what we usually hear is James Madison as the father of the Constitution, Right? And we hear about people like Madison and Hamilton and, you know, Gouverneur Morris and, you know, George Washington, who didn't speak much, but whose presence loomed large over the convention. You know, these are the people that we know about sort of designing our nation's charter. And what was just amazing to me was to find that James Wilson was really the sort of most important person there. Several of the people, several of the early accounts of the convention, going back a century or so, say that, you know, he had virtually no equals there in terms of his legal expertise and his sort of political philosophy, the wisdom of his political philosophy, with the exception of possibly James Madison. So Wilson is a fascinating figure for many reasons. One is that that he was. That he was so much more important to this story than I think most people know. Second, he was the number one proponent from the beginning of the convention to the end to picking the president, letting the people vote for the president directly. The title of my book, he could have said himself. He said it in many different ways. He started in the first week of the convention. He made the case for it, and he continued to make the case for it all the way through to the end. He didn't succeed, which we can discuss why he didn't succeed. But I was struck by his Commitment to what I think a lot of us would think of as a much more modern democratic vision than many of the framers in Philadelphia had. So where did this vision come from? Well, what's fascinating about James Wilson is he was an immigrant, like Alexander Hamilton. He came to America from abroad. He came from Scotland. He had grown up in a poor, religious farming family in the lowlands of Scotland in an area near Fife in the mid 18th century. And in 1765, he was 23 years old. He took a boat across the ocean, and he settles in America. Right. A lot of young people were doing this at the time because America was this ferment of new ideas and revolutionary energy and tension. So Wilson, very quickly, he starts apprenticing in the law. He's trained at St. Andrews in Scotland. First of all, as a teenager, he's trained in St. Andrews. He's literally raised in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. He studies with the people who represent the Scottish Enlightenment. He doesn't just read about it. He's literally studying with Hutchinson and Smith and all of these people. And then when he comes to America, he brings these ideas with him. He brings these ideas of basic human dignity, human equality, ideas that also influenced the other founders, like Jefferson, like Madison, like Hamilton, but at a remove in their cases because they were studying, they were just reading books about them. He comes over imbued with this stuff, and he starts to sort of try to get it. Try to try to spread these ideas which are, you know, people are what matter, not land area, not state lines, and that people are all equal, that people should have as direct a role as possible in the. In the, you know, development and the. And the choice of their representatives. And he's one of the. He's one of only six founders to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And so Wilson's story really is an amazing one, I think, because it gets to a point that I often see, I think, misunderstood or overlooked. When we talk about the Electoral College and other and other structures of a democracy, which is. We talk about democracy reform, I think we often think about it like it's a modern idea, right. Or it's something that's advocated by the people who lost the last election and who have sour grapes, like Democrats who lost in 2016 and are just angry because those are the rules of the game and they lost. It's actually just. It couldn't be more wrong. In fact, people have been trying to, you know, shape this democracy from the very start. And the debates over what the democracy would look like they weren't just born out of whole cloth in 1787. It's not like there was some magical, you know, pronouncement from on high, which I think a lot of people like to imagine about the framers in Philadelphia. In fact, they were battling constantly through that whole summer. They were fighting over how representation in a new constitutional republic would work. And James Wilson really, to me, represented the most forward looking, the most advanced way of thinking about what a democracy is and what a democracy could be of any of the framers. And, you know, he didn't prevail. He prevailed in many ways, actually, which we can talk about, but he didn't prevail on this one, which is the topic of my book.

Yeah. So Wilson. One of my favorite quotes from Wilson in your book is when he says it's strange that annexing the name of Steven State to 10,000 men should give them an equal right with 40,000. This must be magic, not reason, he says. But the framers succumb to magic and not reason, I guess, when it comes

to pick the president.

So tell us a little bit about why it was that Wilson's idea of just letting the people pick the president and having a popular vote for it could Never work in 1787.

Well, Wilson wasn't the only one. Right. Several of the other founders also thought it was crazy to let states have equal power in the national legislature and therefore later in the electoral college when their populations diverged widely. Right. And this is at a time, remember, when the difference between the largest state and the smallest State was only 6 to 1. 6 to 1. All right, that's eligible voters. Right. If you counted everybody, as we would today, it's 13 to 1. Even still, 13 to 1 is way smaller of a discrepancy than what we have today, which is 70 to 1. So the founders couldn't have even conceived of how, how different the states would be today. And even still, they were deeply concerned about this. And Wilson led the charge and sort of that quote, I think is a beautiful quote where he's just basically saying, we are, whatever you want to call it, a republic, a representative democracy. We should be counting the people, not these artificial state lines. The reasons that it didn't work. There were several reasons, and I'll just go through them quickly. One of them is obviously the conflict that ran through the entire convention and affected every part of the Constitution, which is slavery. Right. And that's the battle, largely, that's happening between the Northern states and the Southern states over the institution of Human bondage. And we know that this is instantiated in the Constitution through the three fifths clause. We know that the creation of the Senate by itself gives Southern states extra power in the national legislature that they wouldn't have had otherwise, and therefore more power to. To control debates over slavery. So slavery is a big part of this. And I'll get in a minute to how it actually plays out in the Electoral College. Another one is this concern over to direct a role for the people in democracy and the selection of the President. It is true that several of the framers were concerned that people would not know enough about their national political candidates to. To make informed choices. Right. So that was one of the ideas behind the Electoral College, which was to say, look, we are trusting people to vote for their representatives in the House. Right? That was a direct election. And the House was supposed to be the most powerful branch of government. So it wasn't like the founders thought that people were stupid or ignorant or they were scared of them. It was more a sense that when you were talking about a candidate for national office that most people wouldn't know who know about him. They would know their local candidates and not a national one. So they created this body of electors who were expected to know more about national candidates and who could make a more informed decision. So those are two of the really big ones. And obviously the elements of the lack of any kind of communications infrastructure, the lack of any transportation network, all of those things, the framers understood that people just couldn't get information that easily. So you put those two together and you get to a point where basically no one. And sorry, there's one more. The third element is there was a contingent of framers who really thought it would be best to have Congress select the president. Now, James Wilson, James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, these are the most influential framers of the convention adamantly opposed that. And they opposed it because they were building a new government, a new national government that was based on the principle of separation of powers. And if you have a president who's been appointed by Congress and it's never going to work, that president will be beholden to the Congress that appoints him. So they wanted to do whatever they could to keep the presidency out of the hands of Congress. So you mix all those things together and you end up with the Electoral College. And I'll stop there and let you ask another question, but there's more to say.

Yeah, okay. So the convention sort of divides and as you tell it, they leave this issue of the electoral College until the very end. And they come up with this compromise, which, as you mentioned, incorporates the concerns that you were talking about. But in the beginning, as you discuss, State legislatures have the authority to choose who are going to be these electors, and some give it to a popular vote, but most actually select electors in their own way. So they sort of didn't expect the modern way of picking President, which we call winner take all. When you call winner take all in the book, where every state lets people vote for president, and then whoever wins the state, either by one vote or a million votes, gets all the electoral votes. So tell us a little bit like, about maybe that evolution. And then let's go into where we are now with winner take all and the problems with it.

Here's something that I think most people just don't fully grasp about the way the Electoral College came to be what we call the Electoral College today, as you just alluded to, the final agreement that the framers made was in the very last days of the convention. This was the most vexing issue they faced in the entire convention. They all say this. They say we were just. They were battling over it constantly, constantly over these four months. And when they finally cobbled it together, the plan that we now call the Electoral College, it was in the last week of the convention, they did it. There was four men who did it in a side room of the Independence hall, the Pennsylvania State House. It's the longest and most convoluted provision in the Constitution, 346 words and all it really lays out, other than a lot of technicalities, which. Which don't really need to concern us. The key thing that it lays out is how many electors each state gets. And the decision that they made was that each state would get a number of electors equal to its representation in Congress. And that means its number of House of Representatives members and its number of senators. So two for the senators plus however many Representatives in the House it has. California right now has 53 members of the House and two senators. That means they get 55 electoral votes. And you do that across the whole country. Beyond that allocation of electors, which the Constitution sets out in stone or on parchment, you have virtually total control in the states for how those electors are managed, which means how are they chosen? Are they chosen by a popular vote of the people? Are they chosen by the legislatures, the state legislatures themselves? Are they chosen by the governor? Are they chosen by the governor's brother? Are they chosen by the weather that day? It doesn't matter. They can do it however they Want. This was the interesting thing at the time. What you saw was lots of states trying out different experiments in choosing their electors. So as you said, some did it by the lawmakers themselves, some did by a popular vote. The bottom line is the states have total control over this. You as a regular citizen have zero constitutional right to play any role at all in the election of the president. It is entirely. You are entirely at the mercy of your state lawmakers. So what happened was very quickly, over the first few decades of the country, state lawmakers realized a few states started doing this by popular vote, and then others, there was pressure on the others to do it that way. Right? Because when people see, oh, wait a minute, you know, my friends in the state next door are choosing the. Are getting to choose their electors. Why? Why can't I? So very quickly, within a few decades, all the states had switched to a popular vote for electors. And that's what we all assume is natural today, but it doesn't have to be. Any state could change it at any time if they wanted to. The other point you brought up is this way that they award those electors once they've been chosen. How do you allocate them to the different candidates at the time? There were also a lot of different methods that were in use. One of them was called the allocation by congressional districts. So whichever candidate won a congressional district in that state, they won that, that congressional district's elector. Today we use what's called winner take all. And that is a system by which all of the electors in any given state go to the candidate who wins the most votes in that state, no matter what the margin of victory is. And that's what 48 of the 50 states currently use. Maine and Nebraska don't they use the congressional district system. But it is the system that is by far the most, has the most distorting effect on how the electoral College reflects the popular vote and the will of the people.

So can you say a little bit more about why that is? Why is it, you know, at first glance, and for many people, you know, who just sort of were. Before the George W. Bush, Al Gore election in 2000, it seemed like winner take all with popular vote throughout the whole 20th century was just a weird quirk because the candidate who won the popular vote always won the Electoral College anyway. So tell us a little bit about why it's possible to create this mismatch in a winner take all world. And even when the winner of the popular vote actually wins in the Electoral College, not everything as it seems right Some states still matter more than others. Right?

Exactly. So to answer your first question, the reason that winner take all has such a distorting effect is just look at what happened in 2016. Or actually, let's take 2000 first, because that's even easier. Right? Take Florida. Florida is the decisive state in 2000, right. Once all the other states are counted, the election hinges on the winner of the election. It hinges on who wins Florida. Florida had, I think it was 29 electoral votes that year. Florida's vote, I think 6 million people voted in Florida that year. The differential in the vote between Al Gore and George w. Bush was 537 votes. That's the official difference. Right. There's a bunch of different recounts that have come up with slightly different numbers. It was extremely narrow. It was essentially 50, 50, however you count it, right, 50, 50 means the state equally supported Al Gore and George W. Bush. And yet when it came time to cast their electors, all 29 of Florida's electors went to one candidate, George W. Bush, because he had won by just a few hundred votes. That is an immense distortion of the will of the people. It makes it look like Florida voted 100 to nothing for George W. Bush. It makes it look like there were no voters for AL GORE In 2000 in Florida, which is absurd, there were more than 3 million. So I think it's important to look at that and then to see it replicated across the whole country in 50 states, 48 states across the country. And you realize how basically millions and millions, tens of millions of voters are essentially erased before the actual vote for President even happens. The actual vote being the vote of the electors. Because when only one side's electors go and cast their ballot for President, it means the other ones might as well not exist. So I think that's really the distorting effect. And I don't think any. When people are talking about defending the Electoral College today when they say we should be. I like the Electoral College. Don't destroy the Electoral College. I often ask them, well, which part of it are you defending? Because this part of it, winner take all. There's nothing in the Constitution about winner take all. It's purely a state devised trick to have as much political clout for one party or the other as possible. So if you want, I can get into the other side of this, which is how even when the popular vote in the Electoral College line up, the winner take all rule causes distortions and harm to the system and to the American people. But I can stop for a moment.

Yeah, No, I think that's an important point because the other point you make in the book and you describe in great detail is how winner take all leads to this safe state versus battleground state divide, which makes us feel like we're in a country of red states, blue states, and a tiny few swing states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, that are all that matters. But tell us a little bit about how that distortion comes about red states and blue states.

It's just an illusion, right? It's an artifact of the state winner take all rule. We don't have red states and blue states. We have purple states. All states are purple states. Even in states that overwhelmingly go for one candidate or another, 20, 30, 40% of the voters in those states go for the losing candidate. So it's really the country is purple from coast to coast. And I really think that's, to me, the central point of all this is that Americans everywhere vote for both candidates. No candidate has a lock on any region or any part of the country. I mean, certainly they have a lock, if you want to talk about it, in terms of the winner take all rule. But take away the winner take all rule, and suddenly you see the diversity of the country and you see the diversity of people's views, even people who are living right next to each other. There are 4.5 million people in California voted for Donald Trump in 2016, all of their votes essentially erased. You know, 3.9 million Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton in Texas in 2016, erased. So I think when you take that away, take away that sort of artifact of our winner take all rule, you really start to see that the true diversity of the country and the problem with this, safe states versus battleground states, everyone knows those terms, right? But let's just talk about how they actually affect campaigning and governance on the ground. When you have 40 to 45 states every year, which we would call safe states, and that means states where the outcome is, can be predicted comfortably in advance. And about five states, maybe 10 on the outer edges of battleground states, which are states where you don't know the outcome in advance. What that means is the campaigns of both parties spent all of their time, all of their money, all of their attention, all of their policy proposals aimed at those battleground states. Because that's where moving just a few votes, a few hundred votes in Florida, say in 2000, can swing an entire slate of electors to your team and therefore, possibly the election. The damage that that does is really consequential because what it means is that 80% of Americans are essentially erased from the election. That's more than 100 million voters every year don't matter to the outcome. They'll cast their votes. The campaigns don't care about them. They don't direct their policy proposals at them. Presidents don't direct their governance at them. I think we've seen for the last several months, we've seen this playing out in real life where Donald Trump, who did not win and will not ever win New York and California, has basically gone on a rampage against both of those states, attacking them, trying to undermine their policies because he knows whatever he does, he'll never win their electors. He's sacrificing millions of his own voters in both of those states because of the winner take all rule. Right. So it's really harmful to have a president who is supposed to represent the entire country only representing tiny fraction or only needing to appeal to a tiny fraction of that country to win the election.

Yeah. So this is the perfect time actually. And we got the first question, which is exactly the perfect time to ask it about reform and leadership. Now is a reform organization, so we should say that there are ways to potentially change it. Sampriti asks or says that both the Democratic and Republican party have no incentive to move to any other system, including proportional. So how do you break that logjam? Jesse, you talk a lot about this in the book, but what's the way to get rid of this collective action problem that exists in the winner take all system?

Okay, so there have been more than 700 efforts in Congress throughout American history to amend or abolish the Electoral College. This is far more than any other provision of the Constitution. This is not a new problem. Right. Our discomfort with the way we select our leader is not a new problem. People have been trying to get rid of this system since literally the beginning, starting with James Wilson. And it is true that the people that defend the college and the parties that defend the college have almost always done so, not out of any high minded principles about federalism or about states rights or anything like this. They do it because they think that it benefits them personally. Personally or benefits their party. Right. So that is a hurdle, and that has always been a hurdle. Nevertheless, I think it's important to remember that this has been true for both sides and that in those cases the other side has wanted reform. Right. We've always had people who understand the unfairness, if only because it hurts them. So right now, for obvious reasons, Democrats are the ones who are the most vociferous in terms of, you know, in changing the college and calling to change or abolish the college and how it operates, it doesn't take much to get Republicans on board. You know, right now, Republicans are sort of defending it almost in a knee jerk way. But you know, my books, the inside jacket of my book has this famous tweet from Donald Trump. And the tweet is, the Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy. That's Donald Trump tweeting that. And he tweeted that on election night 2012. Why did he tweet that on election night 2012? As the early returns were coming in that night, it looked briefly like a pattern was emerging that was going to lead to Mitt Romney winning the popular vote nationally and Barack Obama winning the Electoral College. That's all it was. It was nothing actually happened. Obviously, we know Barack Obama won the popular vote, you know, by 5 million votes that year. But even the hint that majority rule would be violated in the biggest election in the country makes everybody upset. When I saw that from Donald Trump, I thought, hell, yeah, I agree, of course, it's a disaster. Right? A few minutes later, he put another tweet. He tweeted again, and he's since erased this tweet, but it said, more votes equals a loss. Revolution. Right? That's how you feel. And so I actually think what I'm trying to tap into in this book is that that fundamental feeling of upset and anger and betrayal, that a system that you thought worked by certain ideals, majority rule, political equality, right, Political equality being one person, one vote, doesn't actually work by those ideals and in fact can serve to violate them dramatically. So, yes, it's true that in a sense, both parties have fought back against reforming the system because they think the system as it exists, benefits them. But I think more and more people are starting to understand that, in fact, everybody eventually gets harmed by this and that. I think once you get enough of a sort of a groundswell of that, I think you start to see greater opportunities for reform, primarily through what we're going to talk about, which is this National Popular Vote interstate compact. But I'm still holding out hope also for a constitutional amendment, because I think it's more possible than a lot of people think.

Yeah. So, okay, so let's talk about that. And I want to frame it. We should talk about National Popular Vote, and I'll let you explain to people what that is and what that solution is. And I also want to put on the table because there was another question from Minthu about a proportional process. So is it possible to start a state by state effort to go proportional? And if so, where should we start? So maybe there's a lot there, but put on the table national population vote and then contrast it with the possibility of doing proportional, either by constitutional amendment or state by state.

Sure. So first let me these get at a similar underlying issue, right? Which is how do you award electors? And again, just to emphasize this point, this is purely a state based decision. The federal government, the president, nobody else has any control over this. This is what state lawmakers decide. So let me just answer that proportional question, because it's a good one, it's an understandable one, and it comes up all the time where people say, all right, fine, the winner take all rule. It really does disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans. So why don't we just do like what this, what makes sense is proportional, right? If 60% of a state goes for one candidate and 40% goes for the other, then give 60% of the electoral votes to the 1 and 40% the other. It sounds good in theory, right? It has a lot of problems and I'll just explain very briefly what they are. I can go into the weeds for much longer on this, but here's the fundamental problem. First of all, without amending the Constitution, you can only do one kind of proportional awarding of votes, which is called whole number proportional allocation. It just means that however many you know, if a state has 10 electoral votes, you can only break them down like by whole numbers, by integers, right? And that's because electors are human beings. They can't be carved up into fractions. The problem with that is you very quickly depart from true proportionality in that case. So just take for example, a state with three electoral votes, right? If that state divides 51 to 49 in the popular vote, how is that reflected by the proportional allocation of three electoral votes? It's not possible. Right. The closest you get is 2 to 1, which is 66 to 33. That's not close to a proportional representation. When you replicate that all over the country, you start to see some of the same distortions that we're seeing now. The way that you could get much closer to a popular vote reflection of the popular vote outcome is something called fractional proportional allocation. And that would be if states could literally divide their electoral votes into fractions by, you know, going out as many decimal points as you, as you please. That is not something they can do without a constitutional amendment, because in the Constitution, electors exist as human beings. Right? Now you would need to Have a constitutional amendment converting the electors into just simple electoral votes, disembodied electoral votes. The states would still have the same number of electoral votes, but they could then, you know, chop them up as they please. That would lead you to a much closer approximation of what our popular vote outcome is. At that point I start to say, well, you know, really, is this what we want to be doing or do we just want to go to a direct popular vote? That leads me into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is yet another way of not abolishing the electoral college, but of using the state based power to award their electors in a slightly different way. And this is, instead of using the state winner take all rule that we've been talking about in this conversation, is using, let's call it a national winner take all rule. The states that join this compact, this is a contract that has been, that is being joined by states around the country. It has been for the last 15 years or so and it has 15 state members as well as District of Columbia States that join this compact agree to award all of their electors not to their state wide popular vote winner, but to the national popular vote winner. And when states representing a majority of electors in the country, that's 270 right now. Right. That's, that's one over half of all the electors in the country. When states representing 270 electoral votes join this compact, it takes effect and therefore guarantees the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Now this to me is a much more elegant and sort of clever way of using the electoral college as it exists today in our Constitution to achieve a popular vote.

Yeah. So it super interesting that I want to talk more about the national popular vote again because I know we have a really reform minded group on the line. And to emphasize that as you said, this is not theoretical. Right. You and your book talk about the progress of national popular Vote. You spoke extensively to John Koza, the sort of inventor slash primary bankroller of this movement. So give us an update about today. Where are we with National Popular Vote? What are its prospects in the next couple of years? And if people are excited to see what National Popular Vote can do and how it would change? And Marin asks in the questions, what would an election look like if we change the way we elected the president? What can we do to bring that about?

It's a great question. And that's the what would an election look like is the subject of the last chapter of the book, which was in some ways the most fun chapter to write. The Popular Vote Compact. The idea, this idea, like the seed of it, goes back into the 70s. Actually, a law professor in the, in the 70s came up with sort of a embryonic version of this. Nobody read about it at the time. He pre published it in a law review and it sort of died away. It's come up a few times since then. A few other people have thought of versions of it. But as you say, John Koza, who's the kind of the father of the effort that has gotten the most traction to date, is a computer scientist living in Silicon Valley who developed this in 2003, 2004, and then introduced it publicly in 2005. And his idea was basically to tie together the interstate compact idea, which is states agreeing to bind themselves to each other with this idea of allocating electors to the winner of the national popular vote. And to say that it doesn't kick in until 270 electors agree. Why is that so important? Because if states had to do it before other states, before it was guaranteed to lead to the win, to the popular vote winner becoming president, they could themselves be putting them. They could be putting themselves in a disadvantageous position. No state is going to do this on its own. States don't unilaterally give up political power unless they know that other states have agreed to do it with them. So COSA introduces this in 2005. States start joining on. I think 2007 is the first is Maryland. And we're now Today, in early 2020, we have 15 state, they have 15 state members and the District of Columbia, those vote, the electoral votes represented by those states and D.C. are 196. You need 270. So that means you're 74 votes shy of getting to 270. And this compact kicking in, it's actually not that far. You know, that's more than 2/3 of the way there. I think there are some complications for getting these last 74 electoral votes, but it is a. They've made remarkable progress. This is the most progress that any effort to abolish or amend the Electoral College has made in more than 200 years. So I really think it's a, it's an exciting and really, it's the most plausible path right now to getting to a popular vote for president, you know, other than an amendment.

Yeah. And so what would it look like? I mean, Marin asked, how would this change who's nominated and change the campaign?

Right. So in chapter nine, the last chapter of my book, I talked to several dozen campaign managers of both political parties who run presidential campaigns in the last few decades. I talked to field directors and ground game coordinators, get out the vote people, almost to a person, they all would prefer a popular vote election rather than the sort of winner take all, state winner take all electoral college election that we have today. And that's because they understand how distorting it is to have to zero in on just a few voters in a few strategic battleground states to win an office that then needs to represent the entire country. Right. They see how destructive it is when you aim your policies and you aim even your governance at say, auto worker, I mean, auto companies in the Rust Belt, or to an elderly population in Florida. So these are constituencies that deserve attention, they deserve policies that work for them, but no more than everybody else in the country. So when campaigns are are incentivized, as they are under our current system, to go for just one out of nine voters and to focus on one out of nine voters, it really kind of corrodes the essence of representative democracy, which is that representative should actually represent their constituents. And by contrast, if you switch to a popular vote election, candidates have to campaign everywhere. They have to win votes everywhere. They have to appeal to people, even in parts of the country, that they know they won't win outright, but that they could actually lose by less. And that's the key. You talk to campaigners and they say this almost across the board. Of course, when you are running an election in which you have to win the most votes and all the votes count the same, you go everywhere, you go to the rural areas, you go to the cities, you go to the suburbs and the exurbs you visit everywhere because that's where people are and you need as many votes as you can get. They all say this is like campaigning 101. So this idea somehow that a popular vote election would lead to, you know, this is the most common criticism I hear is that popular vote election just means LA and New York City will decide our president for it. It's just completely divorced from mathematical reality, which is that New York City and Los Angeles don't come close to having enough voters to swing a national election. You know, I mean, we're a country of 330 million people. It's just not, it's not even close to possible for the big cities to swing the national election. If it were, George W. Bush wouldn't have won the popular vote by 3 million votes in 2004 without support from any of those cities, or without majority support from any of those cities. So the popular Vote Compact really is a way of getting us to a place where presidents and candidates can both campaign and govern in ways that really work for the majority of the people and pursue policies that appeal to a majority of the people, rather than these narrow slivers in strategic states around the country.

Yeah, but so continuing the streak of questions that come in perfectly timed and perfectly framed, not surprising from this audience nominee, though, responds seemingly directly to your answer and says, why would Republicans ever support a national popular vote? Right. And I do sort of see that because, as she says, given the demographics of liberals living in highly populated states, a change would remove the advantage Republicans currently have. So let me flesh that out a little bit. I mean, a, do you think that Democrats currently have some sort of. Is there some reason that Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections? Is that a durable advantage? And if it is, again, no. Many ask it directly. Why would any Republican ever support a change?

We have short memories. Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. In five of the six elections before that, Republicans won the popular vote. If you go back 80 years, from 1932 or now, almost 90 years, 1932, until today, and you add up all the votes for president, popular votes for president, I think it's around one and a half billion votes. The difference between the votes for the Democratic candidate and the votes for the Republican candidate are about 700,000 right out of 1.5 billion. They're essentially tied. And that points to a basic truth about politics in a two party system, which is that the parties are constantly adapting to realities on the ground and changing their messaging, changing their platforms, changing their constituencies in order to win. It is true that in the last three elections, the Democrat has won significantly more popular votes. Now, I just want to. There's a caveat here to all of this, right? Which is it's not a popular vote election right now. So everything we say about how, oh, Republicans couldn't win the popular vote, they're not trying to win the popular vote. Democrats aren't trying to win the popular vote. Nobody does. Because. Because that would be political malpractice to try to do that. Right? Because that's not how you win the election. Donald Trump said, you know, he said many different things about his popular vote loss in 2016, but one of the things he said was, well, if it were a popular vote election, I would have won that too. I'm not prepared to say he's absolutely wrong about that. I think he probably is wrong, but his Point is well taken, which is when you change the rules of the game, you change how the game is played and you change the outcome. So I think we should be careful to assume that if you switch to a popular vote election and all of the changes that would flow like dominoes from that, which include, I think, greater turnout, significantly higher turnout, that you know automatically how that election is gonna go. I spoke, you know, one of the people I spoke to is David Plouffe who ran Barack Obama's, you know, wildly successful and yet I think to many people, implausible. At the outset 2008 campaign, David Plouffe said liberals should be careful to see this as a panacea, this being a popular vote election. He says when you, when you change to a popular vote election and you add as many people to the electorate as that election would add, you scramble the standard political calculus in ways that are very hard to predict. So I really do think right now Donald Trump is able to run a type of campaign and he's able to govern in such a way that it's an extremely narrow band of Americans. Right. It's older white Americans. He bases his governance and his campaigning on sort of white grievance politics that is an increasingly shrinking part of our electorate. If the Republicans cling to that going forward, yeah, I think the odds are they will continue to lose the popular vote like they have the last several elections. I just don't think, I think demographic realities a will themselves impose changes on Republicans. For example, take even under the, even if we stuck with the Electoral College, take Texas, right? Texas is very quickly moving from red toward purple and could very well within a decade turn blue. If that happens under the current system, Republicans have no plausible path to the White House. You will very quickly see Republicans saying the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. Again, if that were to happen.

Yeah, no, that's right. And one point that you make in your book as well is to sort of, when thinking about what a national popular vote would look like, think about governor elections, because no state is allowed to have an Electoral college for state governors. And so in response to Nil Mini's question, there's currently Republican governors in Massachusetts and Maryland, which are some of the deepest blue states. And there's currently Democratic governors in places like Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, deep red states. And the reason is they're running the right candidates and they're running toward the middle. And I think one point you make in the book is people who want more centrist or technocratic or reasonable sort of low temperature politics should want a national popular vote. Right. Because it lets candidate run toward the median voter rather than toward the base. And to the extreme.

Yeah, I'm gonna be a little. I'll be a little hesitant to use terms like centrist or technocratic or even median because I think. I'm not necessarily a fan of centrism. But what I do think you could say is it would force candidates to appeal to the majority of Americans. Right. As you say governors. Right. Governor is a good proxy. Gubernatorial races are good proxy for a national popular vote. They're basically national popular votes in their states. Right. Because what the rules of that game are is the candidate. Every vote counts the same, Every vote matters. And the candidate who gets the most votes wins.

Right.

That would be a national popular vote, too. And those governors, you know, governors will tell you, of course, I go everywhere. I even go to places that I know I'm not gonna win because I just wanna lose by less. So that's what you would see presidential candidates doing, too. And I do think that, you know, you're looking at a situation where even if. And I know I just said this, but I just wanna emphasize this point. Even if we stick with the Electoral College, I don't think it's clear that Republicans have any kind of electoral college benefit going forward. Maybe this year there's a slight tilt in their favor. It's very hard to tell in advance of an election who has the advantage in aftermath of an election. You can say that one party or the other, it was biased slightly in their favor. But really it changes from year to year and there's no way to tell for sure who's going to benefit before the election.

Interesting.

So Kevin wants to know we're now highlighting the benefits of the interstate compact and the national popular vote. And many people are enthusiastic about it. I'm one of them. But Kevin wants to know what you think of a couple of concerns about it. So first, as you mentioned in your book, a recall effort in Colorado, which is one of the more recent states to adopt the compact, is underway and it will appear for the first time on a ballot because there is an attempt to repeal it by citizen initiative in Colorado. So what's your thoughts there? And can the compact require states to. In terms of the arguments being made? Let's just put it that way. I'll read the question. What do you think about the concern behind the effort to repeal the compact? That the compact can require states to give all electors to the candidate who did not win in the state. That is the Force of saying, hey, your vote is going to matter less because we're going to a national popular vote. And Kevin also wants to know, do you have a concern about having a national popular vote under the compact where each state is still administering its own election so the rules for holding the election can differ by state?

Well, we do that now, right? Nobody's bothered by that. That's federalism, right? We run a 50, you know, 50 different states in the District of Columbia run their elections. As they run their elections. It's not, it's not approved. Our people don't seem to be troubled by that. Look, I'm a fan of a more inclusive democracy, right. I think felon disenfranchisement should absolutely be unconstitutional areas, things like this. But as it stands right now, the states decide the qualifications for their voters. We add together all of the electors from those states. I don't see the problem in states having their own systems. That's part of how the American electoral system works. Let's talk for a minute about the compact and the viewers concern about both the repeal effort in Colorado and I think the broader concern just about the political partisan valence of this compact. So one thing I didn't say and I think people who follow the compact know well is that those 15 states plus D.C. that are members are all Democratic led states. I think that's a problem and I would really love to see some Republican led states join this compact. Even though I completely buy the fairness and logic of the compact and I think that if it were to take effect it would benefit everybody, it would not benefit Democrats or Republicans. It would be good for America overall. I definitely understand the optics problem of having a massive change in how we elect the president pushed through effectively by states that are dominated by a single party. That said, people would be surprised to know how much Republican support there has been for this compact over the years. In fact, the compact itself is run by a team of Democrats and Republicans together. These are like some hardcore Republicans too. There's the former national chair of alec. ALEC is a conservative policy and lobbying group that has hugely influential conservative policy impact. There's a Trump supporting Republican on this team. They all believe in the basic concept of all votes should matter equally and the person who gets the most votes should win. And that's why they're on this. That's why they work for National Popular Vote. At the same time, they've won over lawmakers in Republican states all over the country. In fact, the compact has passed four different Republican led chambers in the last several years. And in 2016, three Republican led states were on the verge of passing the compact itself. And then we had the election of 2016. Everybody ran back to their partisan corners. The people around the compact said if that election had gone in either direction, whether to Trump or to Clinton, but just had not split as it did right between the electoral college and the popular vote, they think that those votes, they think that those states still would have passed the compact, but because it split the way that it did, just as it had in 2000 and favored the Republican, everybody ran back to their corners. But I just wanted to make the point that there are a lot of Republicans who, when they sit down and can talk about this with, you know, the people who promote the compact, get it and they support it. Now, just to quickly address the issue of Colorado, I think it's a real concern. You know, Colorado was the first non blues. You know, Colorado is now sort of trending toward full Democratic control. But it's, you know, it's a per. It's basically it was a purple state when it passed this compact. That was a real step forward because it really did suggest that you could get support in states that were not just solid Democratic led states. Now there's this movement to. And they've gotten it on the ballot. They got enough signatures. The people who oppose the compact have become much better organized in the last few years. They really were kind of caught off guard at the beginning because John Koza and his team were so kind of comprehensive and handled this so well. And they were really strategic about which states they reached out to and how they sold the compact to those states. But slowly in the last few years, the opponents have gotten a lot more organized. And when you see these debates happen on the state legislature floors, you really see a lot of the same arguments against the compact coming up again and again. You realize that they're getting their training from the same people. It's some of these people who started the Colorado recall, not recall the Colorado repeal effort. I think it's concerning. I mean, look, it's hard for me to argue that a measure that is all about giving people the power to vote directly for the president should not be decided by the people voting directly in their state. Obviously, the way that states award their electors is done by state legislature. Right? That's what's in the Constitution. So I think there's defense for it there. But I get the sort of how it looks. And I think the problem with this is there's so much misinformation out there about it that it's easy to put something like this on the ballot and to say your vote's gonna be stolen from you. It's gonna be New York and California. I listened to them say this on the Colorado floor last year when they were trying to get this amendment, when they're trying a repeal measure and the ballot measure on. And it's powerful, it's effective, it upsets people. Even though it's completely the opposite of the truth, it upsets people. And then they in a ballot initiative, anything can happen. So yeah, I'm concerned about that one. And I really hope the people of Colorado sort of can read my book and listen to you and listen to others who support the popular vote and understand that this is not actually about taking their vote away from them, it's about giving them a vote.

Yeah, fingers crossed. So we're past the hour mark because we've had so many questions in the chat. I've been doing that, but I want to open it up if anyone on the phone or listening on their computer

wants to ask a question audio wise. Otherwise, I have a concluding question.

Hi there, this is Mintoo.

Thanks so much.

This has been excellent. So can you just talk through and give us some suggestions very specifically about what exactly do we need to do to help make this happen? I know you've given a lot of very good examples of some maybe ways that we could reform it, but just really sort of tactically, how do we make this happen? What should we be doing? How do we invest in it, what types of efforts? Where should we start?

Thanks.

It's a great question. One thing you can do is educate yourself as much as possible about the compact, how it works, and also about the myths and misconceptions about the college. Because often I think that the sort of knee jerk opposition to reform is based on misunderstandings both about how the college works and about how the popular vote would work. I've tried to address some of those here. There's a lot more of them which we haven't had time to get into. You can read my book for the sort of quick version of it. I address six of the most common misconceptions there. John Koza's book, which is basically his kind of manifesto explaining how the compact works, is by far the most comprehensive thing you could possibly read in the entire world on this issue. You can get it for free or for a couple dollars on Amazon or through him directly@nationalpopularvote.com I can't recommend this book to you highly Enough. It is just a fascinating document. It's 1100 pages long. He's been working on it now or updating it now for, I think, over a decade. And 500 of those pages are devoted to dismantling and debunking myths and misconceptions about the college and about the popular vote and about this compact itself. I think it's really worth, first of all, just educating yourself by reading that you can do it online for free, or you can actually, John will send you a copy of the book. He keeps them on giant pallets in his garage, and he just sends them out personally, and he's happy to do it for free. And so just reading that book, reading my book, trying to understand the simplest, more straightforward answers to a lot of these, I think can help defang some of the opposition. This is what the compact authors themselves do when they go meet with state lawmakers who are hesitant or even hostile to them, is they say, look, give me six hours of your time and I will basically convince you. And they do. Most of the time, they convince people. So that's one thing you could do then. I think in states where this is possible to get before the legislature and where you might have a legislature that would consider it, it's really, you gotta put the pressure on lawmakers to start considering this. And I think states that meet that definition are places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona might be one, too, and a couple of others where I think informing state lawmakers and getting them on board enough, you can really start to change the conversation, get them to really consider possibly putting this up for a vote and then adopting the compact and adding to the number of votes, the total number of votes in the compact.

Yeah. And just to add onto that, it's my understanding, Minthu, that the compact, and Jesse, correct me if I'm wrong, the folks pushing the compact currently think that the prospects for any other movement in 2020 are gone. They got Virginia legislature flipped in 2019, and they recently passed the compact. So there's a little bit of action hold right now while we see what's gonna happen with 2020. And of course, depending on what legislatures flip, depending on what happens with the presidential election, depending on if there's an electoral route that could open up a huge amount of possible action in the next couple of years.

And I'll just say, you know, look, the crisis that we're dealing with right now obviously is the center of our attention for the next several months, if not much longer.

And.

And the thing I'll say About that is I don't know how any of this is going to shake out when this is done or when the immediate threat of coronavirus is passed. But I do think it's really another factor that's forcing us to rethink some very foundational structures to our system and to say, wait a minute, we've been doing it this way all along. But why? And I don't think that. I just, I mean, you can tell I don't think there are any really good arguments for continuing to run the Electoral College the way that we do. So I do think 2020 is probably off the table for compact just because a, it's an election year, so everybody's a little more tense. It's much easier to do this in off years when the partisan valence isn't so great. And then also coronavirus, I think, has just thrown everything into, like, if we can run a functional election in November, that will be a miracle. And I'll be grateful just for that, you know. You know, reform to the. Reform to the system can come soon after. But right now, obviously, I think a lot of things are shelved.

Yeah. So okay with that. Hopeful in the long run, but perhaps no change for the next election. We'll wrap it up there. There were a lot of thoughts. Jesse, if you could read the comments too. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of requests for action and info. So I'll work with you and we'll send it out through leadership now. And there were suggestions too, for videos and explainers and things. So maybe before we wrap it up, I mean, do you have any of that in mind or in the docket? Do you know, in terms of while people are cooped up at home?

It's funny, I chose not to put sort of many graphs or charts or video explainers in connection with this book. I really just wanted to tell the stories and to help debunk a lot of the myths. But there's no question that this is very. This is a situation kind of an issue that's very amenable to being explained graphically. And I know people like to share these things on social media. That's great. Do that. I mean, I know St. Martin's my publisher, has put out a few kind of, of quick promotional videos that illustrate some of the things we've been talking about, about the emphasis on battleground states and all of that. So I can send you those and you can share those with people. I know the New York Times OPDOCS unit, which is in my section, the opinion section is they're the video documentary unit. They're going to be doing something on this over the next few weeks and so I'll share that as well. And that can be distributed. That will be like a five minute, a short five minute clip. But again I say, you know, order the book, read it online, order John Koza's book. I really think the more people can educate themselves about this and understand quite why they dislike. You know, a lot of people say I hate the college or I love the college, but many people on both sides don't even know why. They just know it means that they're won or lost. And I think when we understand the roots of why the college is so corrosive to American democracy, we can make better arguments about how to change.

Yeah.

Well, Jesse, this has been fantastic. Much more to come on this topic. Thanks for great book everyone. Who hasn't ordered that book. I know you're trying to sell other books to John Kozas, but people should buy your book, Jesse, and read you unsigned though at the New York Times editorial board. Though sometimes you do write signed op EDS as well. Which, which are great and people should look for those.

Sa.