Fresh off their midterm haul, Democrats are already circling the one institution that stops a few big cities from picking every President.

Their activists swear it’s about fairness, not power.

And Steve Sisolak once did something that blows a hole in that story.

The Battleground Democrats Suddenly Lost Their Nerve

Democrats walked out of the midterms holding the governor’s office and both legislative chambers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. Donald Trump swept all five of those states in 2024.

Those new trifectas take power when the legislative sessions open in 2027. And every one of them inherits the same loaded question.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact asks member states to hand their electors to whoever wins the nationwide tally, even when a state’s own voters picked the other candidate. Eighteen states and Washington, DC have signed on so far, every one of them reliably blue, for a combined 222 electoral votes. The deal only switches on at 270.

Run the numbers on the new trifectas. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin bring 44 electoral votes. Toss in Arizona or Nevada and the compact clears the bar, which means the 2028 race could go to a candidate who loses the Electoral College.

The scheme’s backers can barely contain themselves. Patrick Rosenstiel, a spokesman for the National Popular Vote group pushing the compact, told Politico, “I’ve never been more confident in my life.”

The politicians actually holding the trigger sound a lot less eager to pull it where anybody can see.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said he’s “open” to signing his state into the compact, and at a Crooked Media event he called a national popular vote something that “makes sense.” But he hasn’t worked out a plan with lawmakers.

Incoming Arizona Senate Majority Leader Priya Sundareshan, a Democrat, said her caucus will take it up, with no timeline attached. She insisted Democrats “certainly are and have been prepared to join the compact,” then added that her side wants its priorities to reflect “what we really focused on on the campaign trail.”

Nobody knocked on doors in Phoenix promising to let California decide where Arizona’s electors go.

Wisconsin Governor-elect David Crowley backed a 2019 bill to join the compact. When reporters asked whether he’d sign one as governor, his statement talked about his transition team instead. Michigan Governor-elect Jocelyn Benson’s representatives didn’t respond at all.

Michigan’s Senate Boss Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Incoming Michigan Senate Majority Leader Darrin Camilleri, a Democrat, said he’s open to the idea. Then he let something slip.

“Other states that have done this are not going to be the tipping-point states. We very well could be one of those tipping point-states, and so I want to ensure that everybody is on the same page,” Camilleri said.

Read that one twice. For two decades the compact grew in states where joining cost nothing. California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts never risked a thing, because Democrats carry those states regardless. Their politicians got to feel noble on somebody else’s dime.

Michigan is a different animal. A retiree in the Upper Peninsula actually helps pick the President right now. Under the compact, his ballot gets thrown into the same national pot as the landslide margins out of San Francisco and Seattle.

Ben Wikler, the former chairman of the Wisconsin Democrat Party and a longtime compact cheerleader, waved off the worry. He even admitted the irony, telling Politico that battleground states joining the compact “is like the popular kids abolishing the concept of popularity.”

But then he reached for this: “Everyone here agrees that Wisconsinites shouldn’t be high and mighty, lording over the powerless voters in the coastal states.”

Powerless. California holds 54 electoral votes. New York holds 28. Those are some awfully muscular victims.

A Democrat Governor Already Slammed the Door Once

The whole fairness pitch runs straight into a man from the Democrats’ own bench.

In May 2019, Nevada Democrats ran the legislature and the governor’s office, the same setup they’ll have again in 2027. They passed Assembly Bill 186 to lock the state’s six electors into the compact and sent it to Governor Steve Sisolak, a Democrat.

Sisolak vetoed it. It was the first veto of his term.

He wrote that the compact “could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests” and force the state’s electors to follow the nationwide winner “rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.” He warned it could leave “a sparsely populated Western state like Nevada with a greatly diminished voice in the outcome of national electoral contests.”

No Republican wrote those words. A Democrat governor did, about a bill his own party sent him.

The left-wing activist group Battle Born Progress fumed. Its executive director, Annette Magnus, griped that Sisolak “chose this bill, of all bills this session, to be his first veto.”

Nevada Democrats kept digging. In 2023 they tried a constitutional amendment, AJR6, which skips the governor’s desk entirely. Both chambers passed it, with Democrat state Senator Dina Neal voting no. The amendment needed a second round of approval in 2025 before voters could see it, and that version died in committee in April 2025. It never reached the 2026 ballot.

Sisolak lost his reelection bid in 2022. Governor-elect Aaron Ford takes over with a Democrat legislature behind him, and his office declined to comment.

The Founders Built a Firewall for a Moment Like This

The compact sells itself as simple arithmetic. One person, one vote. But the Framers understood that a country stretched across a continent couldn’t run like a single precinct. They designed the Electoral College so a winner has to stitch together support across regions, from mill towns to cattle country, instead of piling up a mountain in a handful of metro areas.

Philadelphia shows the stakes even inside a swing state. Kamala Harris took about 78 percent of the city’s vote in 2024 while Donald Trump drew about 20 percent, according to the city’s unofficial results. Trump still carried Pennsylvania, because Scranton, Erie, and the farm counties out west had their say too.

Under the compact, those voters land in one national bin with the lopsided hauls out of every deep-blue city in America. Their state’s verdict stops mattering.

Defenders love to point out that Trump won the national popular vote in 2024. So what’s the problem? The problem was never one election. A national popular vote rewires how every campaign runs. Candidates would camp out in the biggest media markets and treat flyover country like a gas station on the way to somewhere else. And Democrats pushed this idea for twenty years because they believed it helped them. Every state in the compact is a state they control.

Then comes the recount nightmare. In 2000, the fight over a few hundred votes stayed inside Florida. Under a single national tally, a razor-thin finish could drag every precinct from Maine to Hawaii into court at the same time.

Maybe some of these Democrats truly believe in the principle. Wikler sounds like a true believer, anyway. But sincerity doesn’t explain why the compact only grows where Democrats hold power, or why it picked up speed the moment they grabbed new trifectas.

And it fits the pattern. The same party keeps floating more seats on the Supreme Court, statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, and an end to the filibuster to ram it all through. Each idea rewrites the rulebook instead of winning the argument. The compact goes one better, changing how Americans choose a President without the two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states a real amendment demands.

Camilleri already expects Republican lawsuits if Michigan signs on. He’s probably right. And a scheme that could land before the Supreme Court with the presidency hanging in the balance is a strange way to promise stability.

But the first test sits in five statehouses, where Democrats now have to decide whether their own voters deserve a smaller voice.

Add Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the compact, and it sits four electoral votes short of 270.

Nevada carries six.

Sources: Politico, “Democrats plot their course on national popular vote”; Nevada Current, “Sisolak vetoes National Popular Vote bill”; The Washington Times, “Steve Sisolak vetoes national popular vote bill”; Las Vegas Review-Journal; The Nevada Independent; Route Fifty; Ballotpedia, “Nevada National Popular Vote Compact Amendment (2026)”; BillTrack50, NV AJR6A; The Nevada Globe; Axios Philadelphia, “The Trumpiest neighborhoods in Philadelphia”; The Philadelphia Inquirer; City Cast Philly