TC6 - "The 270 Problem"

On Monday, April 14th, while the country was watching Iran and scrolling through MAGA media feuds, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger quietly signed a bill that moved the United States 48 electoral votes closer to rewriting how presidents get elected — without touching the Constitution.

It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It's been running underground for 20 years. Most people have never heard of it. And it is closer to activation than you think.

In this extended Trap Check, Darren breaks down what the NPVIC actually does, why the "democracy" framing surrounding it is doing political work the partisan reality underneath it isn't allowed to say out loud, and why the Electoral College — imperfect as it is — exists for reasons that go much deeper than any single election.

This one gets into the architecture. The difference between a democracy and a Constitutional Republic. Why the Founders built friction into the system on purpose. Why the rural voter disappears in a pure popular vote model. And why the direction of travel on the left and the right aren't as symmetrical as the "both sides would do it" argument wants you to believe.

There's also a call to action — a real one, not a bumper sticker. Five states have already passed this through one chamber of their legislature. Michigan is 15 electoral votes. North Carolina is 16. Your state legislators — not your Congressman, not your Senator — are the most important people in this conversation right now. Most people couldn't name them.

We're celebrating 250 years this year. The republics that didn't make it weren't taken down by obvious villains. They were hollowed out slowly. By people who genuinely believed they were improving things.

One compact at a time. One governor's signature at a time.

Think deeper. Stay free.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

You ever drive through a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I mean the middle of nowhere, and you see like a diner and a hardware store, a church, and a grain elevator, and you think, these people exist. They vote, they have opinions about who runs the country, and then you realize that nobody running for president has been within 200 miles of them in the last three election cycles. Well, that image is gonna matter in about 15 minutes, so don't forget it. Because on Monday, April 14th, while most of the country was glued to Iran coverage and watching Trump and Tucker fight it out on social media like two guys in a Denny's parking lot at 2 a.m., something else happened. Something quieter, something that's been building for 20 years and almost nobody noticed. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed House Bill 965 into law, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Now, if your eyes just glazed over, that's the trap. Because this is one of those stories that sounds boring right up until the moment that you understand what it's actually doing, and then it stops being boring super fast. Here's the situation. There's a 20-year-old project in this country launched in 2006 with a specific goal of making the Electoral College functionally irrelevant. Not by amending the Constitution, not by the hard, slow, politically impossible work of getting two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states to ratify a change. Now, by doing something a lot more clever, by getting enough states to voluntarily agree through their own legislatures to award their presidential electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of who their state voted for. Think about that for a second. Virginia signs this. Virginia's 13 electoral votes go to whoever wins the national popular vote, even if most Virginians voted for somebody else. Your state, your voters, your outcome, overridden by California and New York. That compact doesn't activate until states representing 270 electoral votes have signed on. That's the magic number. That's the threshold to elect a president. Virginia is the 18th plus DC to join. They're now sitting at 222. They need 270. They're just 48 electoral votes short of rewriting how presidents get elected, without touching the Constitution. 20 years, slow and steady, and they're this close. Now, the people who support this will tell you that this is about democracy, about fairness, about making sure every vote counts equally no matter where you live. That framing sounds good. It genuinely sounds reasonable on the surface. That's the trap. Because what they're actually doing, and I want to be careful here, I want to be fair, what they're actually doing is solving a real problem by creating a much bigger one that they haven't told you about. So let's get into it. Okay, so first, the argument for the MPVIC, the popular vote case. And I want to give this a fair hearing because some of it's real. The Battleground state problem, that's real. Right now, presidential campaigns pour everything into Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada. A handful of precincts in a handful of states decide every election. If you live in Texas, your presidential vote is functionally irrelevant because everyone already knows Texas goes red. If you live in California, same deal but blue. The outcome is predetermined. The candidates don't come to you. They don't talk to you. They don't talk to the people in Rudbluff in Northern California. Everybody up there is red, but the entire state goes blue. They talk to suburban moms in Philadelphia and retirees in Maricopa County. Now, there's this guy named Patrick Rosenstiel, and I find this interesting. He's a self-described conservative Republican, senior consultant for the national popular vote effort. His argument is that Republicans actually benefit from a popular vote model because it forces candidates to compete everywhere. Every voter in every precinct becomes relevant. You can't just run up the score in safe states and ignore the other half. That's a legitimate point, I'll give them that. But here's where the argument breaks down, and this is the thing the pro-compact crowd is not talking about. Under a national popular vote, the math of where the votes are located changes everything. Here's the reality. The United States has about 330 million people, and roughly 80% of them live in urban areas, in cities. That number has been climbing for decades and it's not slowing down. Los Angeles County alone has 10 million people. New York City has 8 million. The five largest metro areas in the country contain more people than the bottom 30 states combined. Under a pure national popular vote, a presidential campaign can win by running an absolutely dominant operation in about 30 major metropolitan areas and essentially ignore the rest of the country. Not just the battleground states, all of it. The rural voter, the farmer in central Nebraska, the rancher in Montana, the small town manufacturer in West Virginia, the family in eastern Kentucky. They become mathematically negligible. Right now, the battleground problem means campaigns ignore some Americans. The popular vote model means campaigns can ignore most Americans as long as they dominate the cities. I want you to sit with that for a minute. Because here's where I have to be honest with you. The people in those cities are not bad people. Urban voters are Americans too. They have legitimate interests. Their votes should count. I'm not anti-city. I'm not making a cultural argument here. I'm making a math argument. And the math is when you remove the state-based architecture that spreads electoral weight across geography, you concentrate political power into the hands of whoever can turn out the densest urban populations. That's not a bug in the popular vote model, that is the direct, predictable mathematical outcome of it. Now, before I get into my stance, and I'm going to tell you exactly where I stand on this and why, let's talk about the constitutional question, because this is the part where it gets a little weird. The argument for why the NPVIC is constitutional goes something like this. Article 2 of the Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to decide how their presidential electors are appointed. Full stop. States have plenary power in this area. The Constitution doesn't tell them that they have to use a winner-take-all model. It doesn't mandate anything about how the state assigns its votes. So if Virginia's legislature wants to say our electors go to the national popular vote winner, that's within their authority. And on a narrow reading, that's not wrong. Courts have consistently upheld broad state authority over elector appointment. There's a real legal foundation here. But here's the thing that bugs me about it. And I think this is the most honest question that supporters of the compact haven't really answered. The Constitution created the Electoral College as a federal system. It was designed to represent states as sovereign units with their own voices. The Senate was designed the same way, two senators per state, regardless of population, because Wyoming matters even though it has fewer people than some city neighborhoods in LA. What the NPVIC does is use the legal mechanism of state authority, the very mechanism designed to preserve state sovereignty, to eliminate state sovereignty in presidential elections. It's using the tool to destroy what the tool was built to protect. Is that constitutional? It's probably going to end up at the Supreme Court if they ever hit 270. Patrick Valencia, who's Iowa's Deputy Solicitor General, wrote that this compact is ultimately an effort to usurp the constitutionally required electoral procedures. That case is going to be fascinating to watch. But here's what I want to focus on. Because I think the constitutional debate, while it's real, is actually the wrong conversation. It's the downstream debate. The upstream question, the one that almost nobody is asking, is what is the Electoral College for in the first place? And does that thing still matter? Because if you understand what it was built to do, the NPVIC stops looking like a voting reform and starts looking like something else entirely. Okay, now I'm gonna tell you exactly where I stand. Don't glaze over at this because I you're gonna hear this and it's gonna be it's gonna set a lot of you off, alright? The United States is not a democracy. I know that sentence sounds weird. I know we've been told our whole lives that we live in a democracy, that we should spread democracy, that democracy is the thing we're protecting, and we do use democratic tools. We vote, we elect representatives, local governments run referenda, that's real. But the architecture, the underlying structure of this country is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic. And that distinction is not a technicality, it's not a partisan talking point like you sometimes hear on the news. It's the single most important thing about how this country was designed. And most people have no idea what it means. So let me spell out the difference. In a democracy, the majority rules, period. 50% plus one wins. If 51% of the country wants to ban your church, it gets banned. If 51% wants to confiscate your guns, they're gone. If 51% decides that free speech is dangerous and should be curtailed, done. Majority rule, that's how it works. And it also works the other way. If 51% decides that you can't just love whoever you want to love, maybe being gay is gone. Maybe it's a handmaid's tale kind of a situation. If 51% say that abortion is wrong and it should be outlawed, boom, it's gone everywhere. The end. Is that what we want? I don't think so, because the founders studied democracies. Don't get lost in the term the founders. What I mean is the people who built this country. They knew their history. They knew that pure democracies don't last. They tend to collapse into mob rule, then tyranny. James Madison in Federalist No. 10 called pure democracies spectacles of turbulence and contention that have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. That's not a conservative talking point, that's the guy who wrote the Constitution. So they built something different. They built a republic where the people elect representatives who govern according to a foundational law that cannot be overridden by a simple majority vote. The Constitution. And in a constitutional republic, there are things the majority cannot vote away. Your right to speak, your right to worship, your right to bear arms, your right to love the person you want to love, your right to a fair trial, due process, equal protection. The Bill of Rights is not subject to a majority vote. It doesn't matter if 90% of the population wanted to eliminate the First Amendment. They can't. Not through a simple vote, not through an election. It requires a constitutional amendment process that was deliberately made hard. That's the point. Majorities can be wrong. Majorities can be manipulated. Majorities can be whipped into a fever by the right kind of media environment. And hey, we've done a few episodes on exactly how that works. And the majority under the influence of a manufactured outrage cycle is one of the most dangerous things in a political system. The founders weren't naive about this. They built in friction, checks and balances, distributed power, separation of authorities, and the Electoral College was part of that architecture. Now here's where I want to connect it back to the image I gave you at the top: that small town with a diner and the hardware store and the grain elevator. The Electoral College is, in its current practical function, the mechanism that gives those people a voice. Not because rural voters are more important than urban voters, they're not. One person, one vote matters. I believe that. But because in a country this geographically enormous, with this much regional and economic and cultural diversity, a system that concentrates political power in the hands of whoever wins the most densely populated zip codes is not actually representing America. It's representing a slice of America, a very specific slice, a small slice, urban, coastal, economically and demographically concentrated. The farmer in Nebraska has very different concerns than the marketing executive in San Francisco. Different infrastructure needs, different relationships to federal land policy, different views on water rights, energy, agriculture regulation. These are legitimate, substantive policy differences, not one more valid than the other, both are real. The Electoral College forces candidates to compete across geography. It forces them to speak to Nebraska and San Francisco. Not perfectly, we already talked about the battleground problem, but it creates a structural incentive to build a coalition that spans the country, not just the cities. You remove that, you get campaigns optimized for turnout machines in 30 metro areas. And here's the deeper thing, the thing I keep coming back to. If we shift to a national popular vote motto, we don't just change how a president gets elected. We change what kind of president gets elected, what they care about, who they're accountable to, what policies they pursue. A president elected by a national popular vote is accountable to urban majorities. A president elected by the Electoral College has to answer to a broader coalition. That has downstream effects on everything land use, gun policy, religious liberty, agriculture regulation, social issues, energy, the whole thing. This isn't hypothetical, this is structural logic. Now I want to be honest about the other side of this too, because I think intellectual honesty requires it. The Electoral College in its current form does have problems. The winner-take-all model in 48 states means that a Republican in California or a Democrat in Texas is effectively disenfranchised in presidential elections. Their vote contributes zero to the outcome. That's a legitimate grievance. There are reform proposals that address this without blowing up the entire architecture, like Maine and Nebraska's congressional district model, which splits electoral votes proportionally. You could argue that it's more of an honest expression of the Federalist intent than the current winner-take-all setup. But that's not what the NPVIC does. The NPVIC doesn't fix the winner-take-all problem. It replaces the whole system with something the founders explicitly didn't want: pure majoritarian national democracy for the executive branch. And here's the thing that nobody on the pro-compact side wants to say out loud. The states that have signed this compact so far are almost exclusively deep blue. California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, now Virginia. The argument that this is a neutral good for all Americans, that it just makes every vote count equally, runs directly into the reality that every state that signed this is a state that believes it benefits from eliminating the Electoral College. That's not a coincidence, it's a tell. When you follow the incentive, who gains power if this goes into effect? The answer is whoever can run up the biggest popular vote margins in the biggest cities. And right now, that advantage overwhelmingly belongs to one party. I'm not saying that that's a permanent condition though. Coalitions shift, demographics change. But right now, today, the NPVIC is a project that would benefit Democrats and disadvantage Republicans in presidential elections. Both parties know this. The framing of it as democracy improvement, as a fairness issue, as a your vote matters issue, that framing is doing political work that the partisan reality underneath isn't allowed to say. That's the trap. Not that the Electoral College is perfect, it's not. Not that popular vote concerns are illegitimate, they're not. The trap is letting the democracy framing shut down the deeper conversation about what kind of country we are, what the constitutional architecture was designed to protect, and who actually loses their voice when the mechanism that distributes power across geography gets replaced by one that concentrates it in population centers. The rural voter is the answer to that last question, and the rural voter doesn't know that this is happening. Slow and steady, 20 years, 222 electoral votes, only 48 to go. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be concerned about this. You just have to understand what the architecture was for. The United States was built deliberately not to be a democracy, because the people who built it read enough history to know that pure democracies eat themselves. They built something with friction, with distributed power, with protections that cannot be voted away. And one of those friction points is the Electoral College. It's not elegant, it's not perfect. It sometimes produces outcomes that make half the country furious. And that might be exactly what it's supposed to do. Now, I want to say something that I've been wrestling with, and I'm gonna say it carefully, because it's the kind of thing that sounds partisan if I say it sloppy, and I don't want that. That's not what this show is. But I think it does need to be said, because if I don't say it, I'm doing the thing that I always call out. I'm handing you half the picture and letting you think it's the whole thing. Here's what I'm actually sensing underneath all of this. I said earlier that if the political demographics flipped tomorrow, if Republicans started winning urban majorities and Democrats became the rural party, both sides would reverse their positions on the Electoral College instantly. And that's true, completely true. But there's something I didn't say, and it's this, okay? The two directions are not symmetrical. Not in every way, not in the way that matters most when you're talking about the architecture of a republic. Let me explain what I mean. When power consolidates towards the right, and I'm talking historically, I'm talking patterns, not people, the tendency is towards nationalism, towards protectionism, towards cultural enforcement and hard borders. Real problems, real dangers. I'm not dismissing them. But those systems, even at their worst, tend to retain something. Property still exists, markets still function in some form. Local authority still has some meaning. Economic life still happens at the individual and community level. You can still own something, build something, and pass those somethings down to your kids. The floor stays above zero. When power consolidates to the left, however, at its logical endpoint, not its stated intent, the tendency is different. It's toward the elimination of the mechanisms that allow future corrections. Centralized economic control, redistribution of sovereignty upward, erosion of institutional checks that were specifically designed to prevent one faction from capturing everything, and critically, the systematic dismantling of the very constitutional architecture that would let you vote your way back out of it. That's the asymmetry. One direction of travel, even at its extremes, leaves the emergency exits intact. The other direction, at its logical endpoint, locks them. Now, I want to be precise here, okay? I'm not saying everyone who supports the MPVIC is a communist. I'm not saying Governor Spanberger is plotting the end of the Republic. I'm not doing that. That's not what I said, and it's not what I mean. What I am saying is the direction of travel matters. And the question you have to ask about any structural change to the architecture of how power is distributed is not does this feel fair right now? The question is, where does this road go at its far end? A president who has to build a coalition that spans rural Montana and urban Atlanta, who has to speak to farmers and factory workers and tech workers and retirees across wildly different geographies, that president has to govern with broad accountability. They can't just run up the score in six metro areas and call it a mandate. Remove that structural requirement? Well, now you have a system where it's mathematically possible to win everything, the presidency, with it the executive branch, with it the regulatory apparatus of the entire federal government, by just dominating a handful of dense urban populations. And once you've made that possible, you've also made it possible for whoever controls the majority to never need anyone else again. That's not a partisan observation. This is just structural logic. It applies to any party, any ideology, any movement. But right now, today, in April of 2026, the movement actively pursuing this change is exclusively one party, not even in a close way. Every single governor who has signed this compact is a Democrat. Every state in the compact either leans blue or is solidly blue. The organization running this 20-year project has had no meaningful Republican participation in its governance. I'm not going to pretend that that's not the reality just because it makes me uncomfortable to say it, and it does make me uncomfortable. Here's the thing about the, well, the other side would do the same thing argument. It's true, but it's also a way of not saying what's actually in front of you. Because both sides would abuse this power, that's not a reason to hand the power to the side currently reaching for it. I'll say it one more time. The MPVIC is not the end of the republic, but it is someone removing a load-bearing wall and calling it renovation. And 250 years in, knowing what we know about how republics end, I think that deserves more than just a shrug. This is the year of our 250th birthday. America's old, not ancient, but old for a republic. Most countries that have attempted self governance in the history of human civilization haven't made it this far. And the ones that didn't weren't destroyed by obvious villains twirling mustaches and announcing their intentions in some dramatic monologue. They were hollowed out slowly by people who genuinely believed they were improving things, removing inefficiencies, making the system more fair, more democratic, more modern. The emergency exits don't disappear all at once. They disappear one wall at a time, one compact at a time, one governor's signature at a time. Slow and steady. Twenty years. 222 electoral votes. Only 48 to go. So what do you do with that? I'm not going to tell you to be afraid. Fear is the oldest trap in the book, and we've done whole episodes on how it gets manufactured and weaponized. Fear without direction is just paralysis. What I'm going to tell you is this the single most powerful thing you can do right now is understand what just happened in Virginia and make sure someone else understands it too. Not because awareness by itself fixes anything, but because this project has survived and advanced for 20 years almost entirely on the absence of public awareness. Most people don't know this compact exists. Most people don't know it's 48 electoral votes from activation. Most people don't know that just five states, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas, and Oklahoma have already passed it through one chamber of their legislature. One chamber. One election cycle bringing the right governor to one of those states, and it's over. It's done. Michigan has 15 electoral votes. North Carolina has 16. You do the math. If you live in one of those states, your state legislatures, like your state rep and your state senator, are the most important people in this conversation right now. Most people couldn't name them. That's not a character flaw. It's a design feature of a system that benefits from your not paying attention at that level. Find out who they are, know where they stand. Show up in that conversation. Now, here's the kicker, because I don't want to just leave you with stop the bad thing. I want to offer you something real. The legitimate complaint behind the NPVIC, the battleground state problem, that's real. Campaigns ignoring huge swathes of the country because the outcome is predetermined? That's a genuine problem and it deserves a genuine solution. That solution exists, and it doesn't require dismantling the architecture of the Republic to get there. Maine and Nebraska already do it. They allocate their electoral votes by a congressional district. Each district goes to whoever wins it, and the statewide winner gets the two Senate-based electors. It's not perfect, but it does distribute electoral weight more honestly without collapsing the state-based system that gives geography a voice. If that model were adopted nationally, suddenly every congressional district in California matters. Every district in Texas matters. The Republican in Los Angeles has a relevant presidential vote. The Democrat in rural Tennessee does too. Campaigns have to compete everywhere because everywhere has something at stake. It's almost inarguably better than what we're doing right now. It's not a concession to the popular vote argument, it's just a better answer to the problem that the popular vote argument is trying to solve. One that doesn't gut the constitutional architecture in the process. So push for that. Talk about that. When someone tells you the Electoral College is unfair, don't just defend it. Offer them a better fix. Take the argument off the table without surrendering the principle. That's the move. It never has saved itself. It has always depended on people who understood what it was built to protect, who noticed when something was quietly being dismantled, and who said something, who did something. That's you right now with this. Think deeper and stay free. I'm Darren. I'll see you next week.