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Whether or not the 2028 presidential campaign began on November 6, the day after the election, it’s fair to say it was already on some people’s minds. Particularly campaign strategists who are sifting through the data and trying to figure out a path to victory in 2028.

One of the more interesting questions (to me at least) is, what would that path look like under the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV). If it took effect, candidates would no longer try to win individual states but would instead focus on running up their popular vote margins wherever they can. Lobbyists and supporters of the compact have been predicting for more than a year (at least) that NPV will be in effect by the 2028. I’m skeptical, but let’s suppose that happened. What would the election look like?

The organization behind NPV dedicates a whole chapter in its book, Every Vote Equal, to this question (in the organization’s newest edition it begins at page 561: How A Nationwide Campaign Would Be Run). The book tries to push back on the notion that campaigns would focus on large metropolitan areas if NPV were in effect. The crux of the argument seems to be that currently presidential candidates visit small towns and rural areas when they’re trying to win states, so surely they’ll continue to visit small towns and rural areas when they’re trying to win the national vote.

To try to prove this point, the chapter drills down on the 2012 campaign in Ohio, which received 73 candidate visits (NPV’s lobbyists typically use general election candidate visits – by both presidential and vice-presidential nominees – as the main metric for campaign attention). The book makes the following observation:

“Although some people believe that candidates concentrate their campaigns in heavily

populated metropolitan areas and ignore rural areas, a glance at the list of places in Ohio that the presidential candidates actually visited indicates that they campaigned in communities of all sizes and that they campaigned throughout the state… presidential candidates did not overemphasize Ohio’s three biggest metro areas and did not ignore Ohio’s rural areas.”

I’m not sure who believes that rural areas are ignored in the Electoral College – one of its main benefits in my mind is that candidates can’t ignore rural areas – but the larger point is correct:  when trying to win Ohio, presidential campaigns spent time in both large metropolitan areas and small town/rural areas, as well as the mid-sized cities in between.

Based on this (as well as similar patterns on other “battleground states”), NPV concludes:

“In a nationwide campaign, candidates would campaign throughout the country in the same way as they do today inside battleground states—that is, they would allocate their campaign events to various areas based on population… [assuming 399 campaign events by both campaigns and U.S. population of about 331.5 million]. That is, the number of campaign events for each state… is obtained by dividing each state’s population by 830,700 and rounding off.”

There’s at least one gaping hole in NPV’s analysis – it’s absolutely bonkers and any campaign consultant who recommended such a strategy would be laughed out of the room. Nobody serious is going to devise a campaign based on such a simplistic formula. Instead they are going to ask themselves a basic question – where can I find enough votes to end up with more than the other candidate(s)?

Suppose, for example, you are the Democrats’ chief strategist and you figure that under NPV you need to get 80 million votes to win – i.e. more than what Trump received in 2024 but just a bit less than what Biden received in 2020. Harris looks like she’ll end up with about 75 million votes in 2024, so basically you’re looking to find another five million votes. Where to start?

Well, there are a couple of very obvious places to try to pick up those five million additional votes. Start with California, where it looks like Trump will receive roughly the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020, but there are about 1.8 million fewer votes for Harris than Biden received in 2020. 

Next up, New York, where Joe Biden’s 2 million vote margin in 2020 shrank in 2024 to just under a million, and Illinois, where a one million vote margin for Biden crashed to just over half a million. Add in New Jersey, where Harris also underperformed Biden by nearly half a million votes, and you’ve found nearly four million of the five million votes you’re looking for to win. 

Throw in a few major metropolitan areas in a handful of other states – Houston, Texas where Harris underperformed Biden by about 100,000 votes, and the Boston region where she received nearly 150,000 fewer votes than Biden did, come to mind – and there’s a pretty clear path to picking up those five million votes you’re looking for.

Meanwhile, where are you NOT looking for votes to close the gap? Well, Wyoming isn’t going to be on anyone’s campaign stop schedule. Harris underperformed Biden by about 4,000 votes in 2024, and given the lopsided margin in the state (roughly 71 percent for Trump to 26 percent for Harris in 2024, and similar numbers for past elections), no Democratic strategist is going to put resources there just to pick up a few thousand votes.  

Realizing that an NPV campaign would focus on a handful of states where candidates could pick up hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes is only part of the story, of course. Once you decide you can pick up nearly two million votes if you work California hard, you have to decide where in California to go.

For example, you can send your candidate to the Northern counties that border Oregon (Del Norte, Modoc, and Siskiyou), where Harris received about 2,000 fewer votes than Biden did (out of about 35,000 votes total across all three counties), or you can focus on Alameda County and try to persuade and turn out the 115,000 or so voters who supported Biden in 2020 but didn’t show up in 2024. Another choice will also have to be made – send your Democratic candidate to campaign in Los Angeles County, where it looks like nearly 600,000 votes are available if the campaign can match the Biden numbers, or to Humboldt County, where you might add another 5,000 votes to your totals.

These are not difficult – or even serious – questions. Campaigns are going to deploy their candidates and resources where they can pick up the most votes. Visiting small towns in Pennsylvania or Arizona makes sense in a presidential campaign where you’re trying to pick up a few thousand votes here and a few thousand more there in an effort to win the state. When you’re trying to pick up hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes in a national campaign, however, visiting a couple of small towns in the hopes that you might pick up hundreds or even thousands of votes is campaign malpractice. 

Like much of what the people behind NPV claim and predict, the argument that rural America will get plenty of attention if the compact is in effect is simply nonsense.