The Electoral College — our nation’s bizarre system that hands a few narrowly divided states the privilege to choose our presidents — has been entrenched for two centuries.

But a long-game effort from reformers, which has played out quietly in blue states across the country over the past 20 years, has gotten it surprisingly close to toppling.

And a blue wave in the 2026 midterms could finish the job.

The big idea is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s essentially one weird trick for moving to a popular vote system without a constitutional amendment.

How it works is that each participating state agrees that their electors will go to the candidate who wins the highest number of votes nationwide — if, and only if, enough other states agree so that the outcome will be determined that way.

To clarify: There are 538 electoral votes, and it takes 270 for a majority. So if states that have 270 or more electoral votes all agree to award them to the national popular vote winner, then that candidate gets the 270 needed to win, and what the remaining states do with their electors no longer matters. (Their voters still matter because they contribute to the national popular vote — but which candidate wins these states, or any state, is no longer important.)

Nearly every blue or leaning blue state has signed onto the compact, the most recent being Virginia last month — and reformers now have states controlling 222 of the 270 electoral votes they need.

The decisive batch would be the core swing states where partisan control is up for grabs this fall. If Democrats win governing trifectas (the governorship and both state legislative chambers) in enough of them, they could very well cobble together the remaining 48 electoral votes, and actually put this into place for 2028. Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Hampshire are the top targets.

One longtime reason to be skeptical this would happen was the assumption that swing states would never willingly agree to give up their privileged status. But the Electoral College has become such a partisan and polarized topic that narrow state interests may not count as much as they used to, in the face of the Democratic coalition’s overwhelming belief that a popular vote would be better — with the memory of Donald Trump’s 2016 win being a vivid example of what could happen if they don’t act.

But though the flaws of the current system are legion, there are real questions about the proposal to replace it, too. If adopted (and if it survives the inevitable legal challenges), how would it actually function in practice? And if Democrats effectively muscle this through without any significant Republican buy-in — what damage to confidence in our system, and what reprisals, might ensue?

That is to say: would the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact avert an election crisis — or will it pave the way for one?

Throughout the 20th century, it was believed that the only chance for nationwide Electoral College reform was a constitutional amendment, and there was a real bipartisan push to do so after the 1968 election, endorsed by President Richard Nixon. Third-party candidate George Wallace’s strength in the South had risked depriving Nixon of his electoral vote majority, meaning the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives would have determined the outcome. Despite initial momentum in Congress for a popular vote, a trio of segregationist Southerners filibustered the proposed amendment to death in 1970 with help from senators in smaller states.

The 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush was declared the winner in the decisive state of Florida after much controversy, rejuvenated interest in reform. Democrats were of course furious that Bush won, but much of the country believed it was absurd that a 537-vote margin in a single state determined the outcome. Polls showed a large majority of respondents supporting a move to a popular vote system by constitutional amendment. But amending the Constitution is toweringly difficult; ratification requires the backing of 38 states.

An alternative route was that the states could do it themselves — states could simply pledge their own electoral votes to the popular vote winner. The problem there was that if states stuck their necks out to go first, they’d be throwing away their influence under the current system. So several experts and thinkers batted around the idea of a trigger mechanism — a state law that wouldn’t go into effect until the 270-electoral-vote threshold was reached.

After the 2004 election once again came down to a single swing state, John R. Koza had had enough. A computer scientist who had become wealthy from a lottery ticket business (he co-invented the scratch-off ticket), Koza told me he “got all agitated about the fact that Ohio was the key state that reelected George W. Bush, and the rest of the country was basically ignored, including California” — his home state.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Koza had gone from state to state trying to get state lotteries established; if multiple states wanted to work together on a single lottery, they’d create an interstate compact. Koza believed the same device — a binding agreement — could work for Electoral College reform. So in 2006, he launched National Popular Vote Inc., which was (and remains) the major group lobbying for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact around the country.

Though Koza was a Democrat, he took pains to establish the group’s bipartisan credentials, arguing that no party has a durable lock on an Electoral College advantage. Given the 2000 experience, though, Democrats were unsurprisingly most drawn to the idea — by 2014, states with 162 electoral votes, all solidly Democratic, had signed on.

But reformers were optimistic that Republicans would see the light soon. After all, in 2012, Barack Obama was the candidate who was helped by the Electoral College, due to what was called his “blue wall” in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania where he outperformed the national popular vote. Celebrity businessman Donald Trump, for one, was furious, tweeting: “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”

Trump’s win four years later with a popular vote minority swung the pendulum again, squelching any stirrings of reform in red states — and spurring the remaining blue states to act. Of the 19 states that have voted for Democrats in every recent presidential cycle, all have now signed on except New Hampshire (which has not had a Democratic trifecta since 2010).

What the compact has lacked is any true swing state signing on — in part, because Democrats have rarely had unified control of governments in those states. That’s where the 2026 midterms come in. Democrats are trying to hold the governorships in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona — and to take over state legislatures in all four states. In Nevada, they’re trying to defeat the Republican governor and hold the legislature. In New Hampshire, they need to pick up everything.

Basically, the bigger the blue wave this year, the better Democrats’ chances at reaching 270 electoral votes for the compact.

So what happens if they actually succeed?

Back in 2001, Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar co-wrote an article about instituting a national popular vote that laid out much of the basic logic later adopted in the compact. Because of that, he told me, he considered the idea “my baby — maybe not mine uniquely, but my baby.”

Then he used some different analogies: “This is like Doctor Strangelove. I created this doomsday machine, like Edward Teller. Well done, Amar — you just destroyed the universe!”

Amar is a staunch critic of Trump and the MAGA GOP, and he continues to believe the Electoral College is a deeply flawed system — “80 percent of the arguments made for it today are stupid,” he told me. Even so, he’s developed some grave doubts about the compact.

Start with the reality that the compact, as written, does not provide for a national popular vote. Rather, elections will continue to be administered and certified separately in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The “national popular vote” will just be the sum of the vote totals reported by the states.

That, Amar fears, could lead to a host of problems. No organization or body will exist to administer, oversee, or adjudicate the national popular vote, in the case of a close and disputed national vote count — there’s no national standard, for instance, on forcing a recount.

Furthermore, he worried, the promise of “one person, one vote” won’t be realized so long as states can set vastly different rules for how voting happens — or who gets to vote. States could play partisan games to inflate their vote totals and their impact on the national outcome.

Because the Constitution sets no minimum age for voting, blue states could lower their age limit to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote. Red states could respond by letting parents cast votes for their children — an idea that some on the right, including Vice President JD Vance, have mused about.

“The thing won’t really work without an overarching national federal framework,” Amar said. His 2001 article had suggested the national popular vote be administered by “a nongovernmental election commission — made up, say, of a panel of respected political scientists and journalists,” with disputes “decided by, say, [PBS journalist] Jim Lehrer.”

That seems far harder to imagine today. “How naive I was,” Amar told me. “I was imagining, 25 years ago, there might be institutions that had credibility and trust on both sides. It was a different world.”

Which gets to the other major problem — the support for the compact overwhelmingly comes from just the Democratic Party, with Republicans predisposed to view it suspiciously, or as an outright plot to prevent someone like Trump from winning again. “I wasn’t envisioning that it would only be one party supporting the reform,” Amar said.

“The Republicans who have supported it are often either paid lobbyists or some idiosyncratic Republicans who have their own reasons for opposing the Electoral College — I don’t want to dismiss those, if they’re sincere — but the support is overwhelmingly Democratic,” said Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller.

Imagine the national popular vote goes into effect for 2028 and Democrats win the White House — and the GOP wins the 2030 midterms in a red wave soon afterward. New GOP majorities in swing states could back out of the compact — but they could also come up with worse reprisals. From their perspective, Democrats will have set a new norm that the party controlling swing state governments can completely rewrite the presidential election rules before the election for partisan gain.

The norm that electors should go to the winner of each state was helpful to have in place when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election — Republicans in positions of power in swing states relied on it to certify Joe Biden’s win. We may miss that norm when it’s gone.

When I posed these various criticisms to supporters of the compact, they had one common response: that a popular vote is what the American people actually want.

Indeed, a Pew Research Center poll in 2024 found that 63 percent of US adults supported a popular vote system, and only 35 percent preferred the current system. Gallup has found roughly similar support for amending the Constitution to institute a national popular vote since 2000, interrupted by a brief dip in Republican support after the 2016 election.

That, reformers said, means that the wind will be at their backs — and that malefactors who seek to undermine and game the new system will face public backlash. The overwhelming likelihood, they claim, is that states will try and report their vote totals accurately, that the popular vote winner is clear, and that the outcome is respected.

Furthermore, reformers suggest other reasons Republicans might belatedly warm to the idea. For years it was believed that Trump could never win the popular vote, but in 2024 he proved that he could (and the Electoral College provided only the slightest advantage). And if Senate candidate James Talarico shows Democrats can win statewide in Texas, the biggest safe red state in the Electoral College will have turned purple.

“Once the old system is gone, everybody will be scratching their heads wondering why they ever liked it, sort of like the gay marriage issue,” said Koza. “Opinion changes, it changes with new facts, and once there’s a national popular vote in place you’re never going to go back.”

It’s a bet that common sense, rationality, and good government will bring a polarized country together and triumph over partisan malfeasance. What could go wrong?