The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is starting to get major attention. Robert Reich just released an explainer video on it and the New York Times just published an Op Ed regarding it. The Daily Kos community has been super interested in the compact since November 9th. A grassroots campaign around making NPVIC a reality is starting to come into focus so I figured it would be good to review the campaigns from 2017 that had the most traction, Connecticut and Oregon.
I sat down with an NPVIC activist from CT (he happened to be in DC!) to discuss what worked, what we wish we would have done differently, why this bipartisan legislation gets so partisan at the state level, what anti NPVIC talking points he heard from legislators and what messaging instilled the most confidence in the legislators who did support NPVIC. If you want to learn more about Daily Kos activism in CT around NPVIC click here. And if you are wondering what exactly NPVIC legislation is, check out the blog post that one of the CT activists wrote from earlier this year here.
What worked?
A face to face, one to one lobbying strategy worked. This legislation has been introduced five times in Connecticut. This year there were 65 co sponsors — more than ever before — even though there were fewer Democrats in the legislature than any of the previous years NPVIC legislation was introduced.
Many of the legislators agreed to co-sponsor the NPVIC bill after meeting with and hearing from a lot of fired-up grassroots activists.. Even after the formal legislative session ended five more co-sponsors signed on. We expect this legislation to come back next year and plan to keep lobbying for additional co-sponsors..
Also large organizational support from national and states groups was present i.e. Daily Kos, LegitAction, League of Women Voters. They brought netroots pressure to back up and amplify the effort of on the ground activism.
What else do you wish you could have done??
When constituent outreach didn’t work, we needed alternate strategies that were ready to go. One thing we need to do this coming year is reach out to non-partisan, national good government and voting rights organizations and convince them to publicly support and advocate for NPVIC a. We should take advantage of the influence that leaders of these groups have and encourage them to come out strongly in support of the principal that every vote should matter. deal.
There was also a huge need for educating voters and legislators. It's not that people don't support a national popular vote, it’s that , they don't even know that NPVIC exists. We had two great public forums with New Yorker political commentator Hendrick Hertzberg, but that can’t be scaled. We met with a lot of activist groups, but frankly we just didn’t have enough activists to reach enough people. We needed to do a better job building our social media presence and using online video. There is a short segment in a great documentary — Electoral Dysfunction — that uses third graders to explain the failings of “winner take all.”
How did you deal with the fact that CT Republicans turned the national popular vote into a partisan issue, even though some had supported it in past years?
We went into this hoping for bipartisan support. If any voter stands to gain from the national popular vote in Connecticut, it’s those that vote for Republican presidential candidates. Connecticut hasn’t gone for the GOP candidate in a quarter century. The 673,215 people who voted for Trump could have all stayed home and the outcome would have been exactly the same. I don’t know why all but one Republican were against the NPVIC—prominent Republicans like Newt Gringrich support the Compact.
But once it became clear that the bill would only pass on a party-line vote, we adjusted our messaging to make it more relevant to Democrats. The narrative was pretty simple: not only is NPVIC the right thing to do—to make everyone’s vote matter—it’s the necessary thing to do.
The fundamental problem of winner-take-all is that the only voters that really matter are the ones in battleground states—they’re the ones who decide who becomes president.
So we did some analysis and found that Republicans completely control the legislatures in eight of the 12 swing states. And in almost all of those states there have been GOP-led voter suppression efforts aimed at reducing Democratic turnout. If you look at the potential impact of those efforts, you’ll see in many cases the number of votes that could have been or were suppressed exceeds Trump’s margin of victory.
With an administration intent on suppressing Democratic votes, and Republican control of a majority of swing states, the current winner-take-all method will make it very hard to put a Democrat in the White House in 2020. So, in addition to being the right thing to do, the national popular vote will help level the playing field. If Republicans want to win by suppressing votes, they would have to do it in all 50 states, not just a dozen battleground states.
What were the concerns brought up by the Democrats that didn’t support the bill?
We learned early on that there are a handful of concerns that regularly mentioned. Although they didn’t say it, we believe some legislators were wary of supporting something state Republican legislators opposed because their districts voted for Trump. That’s understandable ( Democrats have lost a lot of seats in the past eight years)
Many of the undecided and opposed legislators stated they feared the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was an "end run" around the Constitution. That’s simply not true, as the Constitution reads, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” It wasn’t until the 1820s that states began adopting the winner-take-all method of voting electors that is today used by 48 of the 50 states.
Another fear was NPVIC would disenfranchise Connecticut voters because the state may cast its electoral votes for a candidate who did not win the state's popular vote. One of our activists had a great response to that, “states don’t vote for presidents, people do.” It really doesn’t matter how the state in total votes, what matters is that every voter matters, and that’s what the Compact does. The real disenfranchisement happens under winner-take-all, where voters in reliably blue or red states who don’t vote with the majority don’t matter.
We spent time listening to all the concerns and how to respond to those fears. ou can check them out on the Connecticut National Popular Vote website, here.
What message is the most effective?
Make every vote matter. Hands down. That’s what people care about. . It makes sense to people. Everyone's vote should matter equally in a presidential election, no matter where you live. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an elegant way to do that without abolishing the Electoral College. As a message more directed to legislators, we’re going to try using, “Let’s elect the president the way you are elected.” Gets right to the point, hard to argue with!