The 48 Votes Standing Between Us and a Different Kind of Presidency
Pennsylvania matters. Michigan matters. Wisconsin matters. If you live anywhere else, your presidential vote is mostly decoration.
That sounds harsh until you look at the numbers. In the eight months leading up to the 2024 election, candidates made more than 200 campaign stops, and three out of every four happened in just seven states. The other 43 got the leftovers. If your zip code wasn’t on a battleground map, you weren’t being courted. You were being assumed.
Virginia just decided it had enough of being assumed. Earlier this month, Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation making Virginia the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement among states to assign their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most votes nationwide. The compact only kicks in once enough states sign on to control 270 electoral votes, the magic number to win the White House. Right now the pact sits 48 votes short. Backers say 2028 is realistic.
Without amending the Constitution, without a single vote in Congress, we could be two years away from a presidential system where the person with the most votes actually wins. Five times in our history, the loser of the popular vote has taken the Oval Office anyway. Two of those times happened in our lifetime.
The case for the compact is not complicated. When candidates only need to win seven states, they only listen to seven states. Tariffs, manufacturing policy, immigration, Medicare, energy, all of it gets filtered through what plays in Erie or Maricopa or Macomb County. If you are a teacher in Mississippi or running a shop in Idaho or working as a nurse in upstate New York, your concerns are background noise. Researchers at CIRCLE found that turnout among voters under 30 ran 17 points higher in battleground states than everywhere else. That is not apathy. That is math. Young voters know when a system is built to ignore them.
Critics raise a fair point. They argue the compact does not eliminate disenfranchisement so much as relocate it. Voters in states that don’t join would feel even more sidelined if their state’s electoral votes ended up in a candidate’s column they did not pick. Rural advocates worry that whoever wants 70 million votes will spend their time in Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami, leaving small towns talking to empty podiums.
Both criticisms deserve weight. But they describe a different problem, not a worse one. Right now we have manufactured swing states and ignored everywhere else. A national popular vote would push candidates to chase votes wherever votes live, which includes suburban Texas, rural Pennsylvania, exurban Georgia, and yes, the cities. The pool of relevant voters expands from roughly 30 million people in seven states to all of us.
The deeper question is what kind of democracy we want our kids to inherit. One where presidential candidates work a handful of counties and then govern the country, or one where every vote pulls the same weight no matter the line on the map. Polling has shown majority support for direct election of the president in survey after survey going back decades. The resistance has never been about what voters want. It has been about what the current system protects.
The compact still faces hurdles. Legal challenges are nearly certain the moment it crosses 270. Congress may try to weigh in. State legislatures can repeal what they passed. None of that is settled.
What is settled is that something has to change. We are tired of being treated like spectators in our own elections. Eighteen states are betting that we are ready for a new arrangement. Forty eight electoral votes will tell us if they are right. Go beyond the headlines…
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