Buttigieg Wants Blue States to Sidestep the Electoral College. DeSantis and Rand Paul Are Fighting Back.

Pete Buttigieg has found a way to get rid of the Electoral College without bothering to amend the Constitution. All he needs is a handful of state legislatures that just changed hands.

“If just a few more states change their state law, we could effectively do away with the Electoral College,” the former Transportation secretary told Jen Psaki in a clip MS NOW posted Wednesday. “To me, it’s a no-brainer.” The system, he said, exists “because of some very arcane kind of parochial politics in the 1770s,” and “it makes no sense.”

By Thursday, Republicans had stopped treating it as cable chatter. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee all came out swinging for the Founders’ design within hours of each other. That’s the new part. A plan Democrats used to float in think-tank papers now has a likely 2028 contender selling it on television, and the people who would have to stop it are saying so out loud.

We first laid out the math the week of the election, when five states flipped to full Democratic control, and again when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he’d work with lawmakers to join. Here’s where it stands now.

Five states, one finish line

The vehicle is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Each member state promises to hand all of its electors to whoever wins the most votes nationwide, no matter how its own voters went. The pledge only switches on once the members add up to 270 electoral votes, enough to pick the president by themselves.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have already signed on, worth 222 electoral votes, according to the New York Times count. On Nov. 3, Democrats won the governor’s office and both legislative chambers in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Add those five and the compact reaches 283. Lawmakers in all five have filed bills to join in recent years.

That is what Buttigieg means by “a few more states.” No two-thirds of Congress. No 38 states ratifying an amendment. Five bill signings in five capitols, and the way America has picked presidents since George Washington would be dead in practice while still sitting in the Constitution on paper.

The California problem

DeSantis went straight at the practical side. Quoting the Buttigieg clip, he wrote that abolishing the Electoral College “would mean not knowing who won the presidency for 4 weeks while California keeps counting. No thanks.” The post had more than 27,000 likes by Thursday night.

He has a point that anyone who watched the last few elections will recognize. California law gives its counties a month after Election Day to finish their official canvass, and the state routinely spends weeks tallying mail ballots that arrive late or need signatures fixed. Under today’s system that mostly matters for close House races. Under a national popular vote, a margin of a few hundred thousand votes nationwide could leave the whole country waiting on Los Angeles County.

It gets worse in a close race. Today a recount is a state affair, fought inside one state’s rules, the way Florida was in 2000. A national popular vote has no national recount law, no national ballot rules and no single referee. A razor-thin result could mean recount fights in dozens of states at once, each counting by its own standards.

“One of the most brilliant compromises”

Rand Paul made the constitutional case. “Our Founding Fathers built checks and balances into our Constitutional Republic for a reason,” the Kentucky senator wrote. He noted that Justice Antonin Scalia called those checks the most important thing about the Constitution, and said the Electoral College is “one of the most brilliant compromises of the post-Revolutionary era.”

From his Senate account, Paul added that the Electoral College is “an inseparable friend to those who believe that every American across our vast country deserves to be heard.” Mike Lee of Utah quoted that post and kept it short: “The electoral college is an indispensable feature of the Constitution. We must protect it.”

That’s the heart of the disagreement. Buttigieg says the fair rule is simple: every vote counts the same and the person with the most votes wins, just like a governor’s race or a school board seat. The Founders deliberately chose something else for the one office that governs all fifty states. James Madison warned at the 1787 convention that “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger,” a point the research group Just Facts highlighted in its own answer to Buttigieg. The Electoral College forces a winner to build a coalition across many different states instead of running up the score in a few giant metros.

Buttigieg pitched it the other way. Without the Electoral College, he argued, candidates “would have to campaign in all 50 states,” from Alaska to Wyoming. Plenty of small-state voters would bet on the opposite: that campaigns would park themselves in the biggest media markets and never leave.

Not as simple as five signatures

Even if all five states sign on, the compact walks straight into court. The Constitution forbids states from entering compacts with each other without Congress’s consent when those deals cut into federal power. Samford University law professor William G. Ross told the Times the plan “most likely” violates that clause. Florida State’s Michael Morley said it could clash with state constitutions that limit statewide elections to a state’s own residents, since out-of-state votes would effectively decide where its electors go.

Then there’s the question nobody pushing the compact likes to answer. Picture a Republican winning the national vote while a Democrat carries the old electoral map. Would a blue state’s officials really hand their electors to the Republican their own voters rejected? Morley doubted a federal court would force them.

Republicans can’t stop a state from passing its own law. What they can do is make sure voters in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Lansing, Harrisburg and Madison know exactly what their new legislatures are being asked to give away before anyone signs: their state’s own say in picking the president.

DeSantis already wrote their answer in two words. Five statehouses are about to hear it: no thanks.