Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed HB 965, the National Popular Vote Compact, into law on Tuesday. Under this interstate agreement, whichever presidential ticket wins the national popular vote will receive Virginia’s 13 electoral votes, even if a majority of the Commonwealth’s voters chose a different candidate.
Fox News reported that the interstate compact:
[O]perates on a conditional trigger that keeps the law dormant until it can guarantee a victory for the national popular vote winner. While member states pass the legislation individually, the compact only activates when the total electoral weight of all participating states reaches a majority of the Electoral College, at least 270 electoral votes.With Virginia officially joining, the compact currently sits at 222 electoral votes, meaning it remains 48 votes short of the threshold.
The following states have enacted the compact to date (via The National Popular Vote website):
California: 54Colorado: 10Connecticut: 7Delaware: 3Hawaii: 4Illinois: 19Maine: 4Maryland: 10Massachusetts: 11Minnesota: 10New Jersey: 14New Mexico: 5New York: 28Oregon: 8Rhode Island: 4Vermont: 3Virginia: 13Washington: 12District of Columbia: 3
It’s no coincidence that the list includes only blue states.
The summary of the Virginia bill states:
National Popular Vote Compact. Enters Virginia into an interstate compact known as the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote. Article II of the Constitution of the United States gives the states exclusive and plenary authority to decide the manner of awarding their electoral votes. Under the compact, Virginia agrees to award its electoral votes to the presidential ticket that receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.The compact goes into effect when states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes have joined the compact. … The bill also provides for the manner of appointing electors when such agreement does and does not govern the appointment of electors.
Needless to say, the Virginia Republican Party was rightly outraged by the “fake moderate” governor’s latest move, calling it “an unconstitutional assault on our democracy.” They characterized HB 965 as “a bill to render Virginians’ vote for president NULL AND VOID!” in the social media post below.
According to NPV, “six additional states with 65 electoral votes … are especially promising places for obtaining the 48 electoral votes needed before 2028.”
These states, which are all swing states, include:
Arizona: 11Michigan: 15New Hampshire: 4Nevada: 6Pennsylvania: 19Wisconsin: 10
It’s worth noting that if the compact had reached the 270-electoral vote threshold in 2024, President Donald Trump, who won the national popular vote, would have received the electoral votes of every participating state. His victory in the Electoral College over former Vice President Kamala Harris would have been even more decisive than it already was.
By contrast, had the threshold been met in 2016, Trump would have lost the presidency to Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote that year.
A Republican winning the national popular vote, however, has been relatively rare in recent decades. Before Trump’s 2024 victory, the last Republican to do so was President George W. Bush in 2004.
The Democrats have been trying to abolish the Electoral College for at least two decades. While the framers of the Constitution had several reasons for creating it, a central concern was that states with smaller populations would be overshadowed by larger ones, leaving them with little meaningful voice in presidential elections.
The Electoral College, like Congress itself, was designed as a compromise. It blends population-based representation, reflected in the House, with equal state representation in the Senate. In this way, it ensures that presidential candidates must build geographically broad support rather than relying solely on dense population centers.
If the Electoral College were abolished in favor of a national popular vote, presidential campaigns would concentrate overwhelmingly on the nation’s largest population centers. Candidates would maximize their vote totals by focusing on states like California, New York, Texas, and Florida, along with a handful of major metropolitan areas, rather than competing across a broad range of states. In such a system, voters in smaller or less populous states could see their influence diminished, as campaigns devote fewer resources and less attention to regions that offer fewer raw votes, raising concerns about whether those communities would be fully represented in the national political conversation.
Virginia voters delivered Spanberger a landslide victory in November over her Republican opponent, then–Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. But despite presenting herself as a moderate during the campaign, Spanberger’s congressional voting record — nearly 100% aligned with the Democrats’ progressive agenda — suggested her governance would be anything but.
Within 48 hours of taking office, she moved to end the state’s cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled legislature began advancing a slate of bills aimed at implementing her agenda, including a wave of new taxes, the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for certain serious crimes, restrictions on hand-counting election ballots, and race-based limits on eligibility for certain government contracts under $100,000.
For many constituents, the shift felt like a bait-and-switch. Had they taken the time to look at her voting record in Congress, none of this would have come as a surprise.
Virginia Democrats have moved quickly to lock in their progressive agenda and it was always just a matter of time before they turned their guns on the Electoral College.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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