The Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Louisiana v. Callais changed the calculation. The 6-3 decision, written by Justice Alito, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination rather than statistical disparity, effectively freeing Republican legislatures to redraw majority-minority congressional districts across the South and beyond. Democrats had their institutional response before the opinion’s ink was dry: accelerate the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger had just signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) into law, making Virginia the 19th jurisdiction to pledge its electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner regardless of how Virginians vote. Michigan’s House Committee has already approved matching legislation, with Governor Whitmer signaling support. The compact stands at 222 electoral votes, just 48 short of the 270 needed to activate. I know a power-consolidation play when I see one. The Founders built guardrails for exactly this moment — and we should strengthen them, not hand the presidency to whichever party controls the densest zip codes.

The Electoral College was never some dusty antique that outlived its purpose. Delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention rejected a direct national popular vote because it would let a handful of population centers dictate terms to everyone else. They rejected congressional selection because it bred backroom deals. They settled on an electoral framework tied to each state’s congressional delegation, and most states adopted winner-take-all allocation. The system forced candidates to build genuinely national coalitions and functioned across 60 presidential elections because it respected federalism. As Justice Antonin Scalia observed consistently, structural safeguards are not obstacles to self-governance — they are its architecture.

The map that cable news panels studiously avoid tells the real story. In 2024, Donald Trump carried 2,660 counties. His opponent won roughly 451 — concentrated in the dense urban cores of Los Angeles, Cook County, New York City, and a tight cluster of others. Those 2,660 counties grow the food, drill the energy, manufacture the goods, and raise the next generation. Under a pure popular-vote regime, a........

© Townhall