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It’s no secret that the campaign to nullify the Electoral College with the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) has lost steam. Just consider recent events in Maine and Nevada. 

Maine barely passed NPV last year in the face of bipartisan opposition. Gov. Janet Mills refused to sign it, but did allow it to take effect. This  year, it barely survived a repeal effort. The bill to withdraw from NPV passed the House easily and lost in the Senate by one vote. 

In Nevada, after muscling a proposed constitutional amendment through the legislature in 2023, NPV dropped the ball. They never even bothered to show up this year to try to get it passed the necessary second time before it could go to Nevada voters. 

Despite NPV bluster about putting the compact into effect for the 2028 election, no state held even a single hearing to pass the compact this year. The pressure was in the other direction: three states heard repeal efforts in committee (Colorado and Rhode Island joined Maine as members considering withdrawing from the compact).

What do you do when you can’t make headway in the normal legislative process? Some NPV allies say the answer is to use federal power to coerce states to join. That, at least, is my takeaway from something called Project 2029, which aims to lay out a left-of-center agenda for a future Democratic presidential administration. The very first – and as of my writing, the only – proposal by the group is a scheme to use the power of the federal government to jam NPV through states that otherwise aren’t interested.

That’s not the way it’s described, of course – instead there’s lots of language saying things like “the [next Democratic] President should… encourage states to enhance election integrity by passing the NPVIC into law” and calling for “…bold executive action to encourage state support for the NPVIC.” Later in the piece it specifically targets funding by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), stating that the heads of those entities should “…heavily prioritize states that have already passed the NPVIC into law when issuing federal funds to state or local election offices or administrators…”

What an appalling idea – making disaster preparedness funding contingent on whether a state has joined NPV. Ironically. lobbyists for the NPV organization routinely claim (inaccurately) that federal disaster declarations and the federal funding that comes with them are improperly influenced by the Electoral College and the “winner take all” method that most states use for allocating electors, specifically that “battleground states” are twice as likely as “non-battleground states” to receive disaster declarations. I wonder if they’ll be just as concerned by their allies’ explicit plan to politicize disaster-preparedness and -relief funding as part of an effort to coerce states into joining NPV as they are the imaginary politicization they claim exists?