MARCH 14, 2019

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MAR. 5, 2019, AT 10:55 AM

The Movement To Skip The Electoral College Is About To Pass A Major Milestone
With Colorado expected to join, the National Popular Vote compact is about to snag its first purple state.
By Nathaniel Rakich

Graphics by Rachael Dottle
Filed under Electoral College

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, it was the fourth time in American history — and the second time this century — that a candidate won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Now a group of voting-rights activists is working to prevent any future presidents from taking office the same way.

[How popular is President Donald Trump?]

The National Popular Vote initiative seeks to set up an interstate compact that would effectively do an end run around the Electoral College without actually abolishing it, which would require the lengthy, laborious process of building broad, bipartisan support to pass a constitutional amendment. The logic behind the compact is that the Constitution already gives states the power to award their electoral votes how they see fit, so each state that signs on to the compact agrees to award its electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote — not necessarily the candidate who wins that state. There’s just one catch: The agreement only goes into effect when the states who’ve joined are worth a total of 270 electoral votes — enough to deliver an automatic victory to the popular vote winner.

Currently, 11 states (plus the District of Columbia) representing 172 electoral votes have signed on to the compact, but Colorado and its nine electoral votes are primed to join in the next few weeks. (The state House and Senate recently passed the bill, and Gov. Jared Polis has said he will sign it.) That would bring the total number of signatories to 13 and the electoral-vote count up to 181 — two-thirds of the way to 270. Now the compact just needs to bring on enough new states to get 89 additional electoral votes and it would radically change how the U.S. picks its president. The million dollar question is, could it really happen?


For the last few years, it has looked impossible. The compact had passed in 12 places, yes, but all of them were solidly blue — before the 2018 midterms, all of them were at least 11 points more Democratic-leaning than the country as a whole.1 What’s more, supporters had almost run out of low-hanging fruit to target; only one other state that blue (Delaware) has yet to sign on, and it is worth only three electoral votes. It seemed like the National Popular Vote campaign had hit a ceiling. Red states were (and still are) unlikely to join, given that both times the popular vote and electoral vote split in living memory — in 2000 and 2016 — the outcome favored the Republican candidate.2 And purple states theoretically have little incentive to sign on; every four years, presidential candidates shower them with a disproportionate share of their attention (campaign visits, media buys) in an effort to snag some of those precious few swingable electoral votes. That would all go away if the only thing that mattered was the nationwide popular vote.

But Colorado represents an important breakthrough. With a partisan lean of D+1, it’s the first swing state to sign on to the compact. But like 10 of the other 12 jurisdictions to pass the compact, Colorado is doing so when Democrats have full control of state government, meaning the party is in power in both branches of the legislature and holds the governorship. And even in the other two instances, it was still possible for the compact to pass with only Democratic support.3 That suggests that a state’s willingness to pass a National Popular Vote bill may rely not just on its blueness in presidential elections but also on whether its legislature and governor are Democratic. And in Colorado, most Democratic legislators voted for the legislation even as opponents argued it would eliminate Colorado’s clout as a swing state. (Not a single Republican voted to support it.)

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So if we assume that these bills will only pass in states where Democrats can push them through without GOP support, what other states might join the compact in the next few years, and would those states be enough to reach 270? New Mexico, where the compact has already passed the state House, looks like the most likely next signatory, which would add five electoral votes. After that, there will be four remaining states that have not yet signed on and where Democrats have full control of state government: Delaware, Maine, Nevada and Oregon, which would contribute a total of 20 more electoral votes. (All four states are considering bills that would have them join the agreement.) In addition, Democrats have a good chance to take full control of Virginia’s state government after this fall’s legislative elections, which could add another 13 electoral votes. But even if all these states pass a National Popular Vote bill, the compact would still sit at 219 electoral votes — 51 shy of the number needed for it to take effect. Democrats would then need to take full control of several more states for the compact to become a reality.

And even if the party accomplishes that difficult task, it’s not safe to assume that those states will automatically join the agreement; Delaware and Oregon have had Democratic-controlled governments for years and still have not joined (the campaign to ratify the compact kicked off in 2006). Opposition to the effort will likely ramp up, too, if the compact begins to look like a serious possibility. Right now, if the compact has any chance of being realized, it likely won’t be for many years.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge to the National Popular Vote agreement may be a legal one. Election-law expert Rick Hasen at the University of California, Irvine School of Law told FiveThirtyEight he expected there would be serious legal challenges to the compact if it crosses the 270-elector threshold. Opponents may brandish the part of the Constitution that says that interstate compacts require the consent of Congress, or they may argue that it runs afoul of the Voting Rights Act because it may diminish the clout of minority voters. And, of course, there is the fact that it circumvents what the founders intended — the Electoral College was designed to be an indirect method of electing the president. So even if organizers somehow get states worth 270 electoral votes to join the compact, expect it to face a long fight in the courts challenging whether it can actually take effect.

CORRECTION (March 5, 2019, 1:07 p.m.): A previous version of the cartogram in this article mistakenly failed to identify Connecticut as part of the National Popular Vote initiative.

Nathaniel Rakich is FiveThirtyEight’s elections analyst. @baseballot


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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-2020-democratic-nomination-kickoff/?cid=referral_taboola_feed
FEB. 19, 2019, AT 6:49 AM
How Bernie Sanders Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination
By Clare Malone
Filed under 2020 Election

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / GETTY IMAGES

Bernie Sanders is a famous, successful loser.

When he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in April 2015, Sanders trailed Hillary Clinton in the polls by nearly 57 percentage points. By spring of 2016, some polls showed him within single digits. Sanders was no longer an obscure senatorial frump from Vermont — he was a bona fide political phenomenon whose primary success embodied the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

But 2020 is not 2016. Sanders kicked off his 2020 run early on Tuesday, and as he navigates his second presidential primary, he’ll need to prove he can build on his past success, not coast on his 2016 coalition.

Sanders enters the 2020 race not as an underdog but as a Democratic Socialist leader of the pack; an early Iowa poll showed him commanding 19 percent of the vote of likely caucusgoers, second only to former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders comes to the race with the high name recognition that many candidates in the crowded field lack, and with a glossy pelt hanging off his political belt: the grassroots movement that propelled him to unexpected heights in 2016.

While many 2020 contenders will spend the early days of their campaigns conveying just what sort of candidate they would be and delicately trying to signal what kinds of voters they think they appeal to, Sanders is already a known quantity. In a recent YouGov poll, only 16 percent of respondents said they didn’t know what they thought of him, compared with 38 percent who said the same of Kamala Harris and 29 percent who didn’t know what to think of Elizabeth Warren. Engaged Democratic voters will know that Sanders’s brand is populist — free college, $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for all” — and polemical. The senator’s early charm in 2016 seemed to lie in his harangues against an unmitigated free-market system and the need for political revolution. In the age of President Trump, many Democrats might be looking for a pure-of-heart angry warrior figure in their candidate — someone with a distinct brand of politics that hasn’t been formed solely in reaction to the president. Sanders certainly is that.

We know who was attracted to that kind of candidate in the last Democratic primary. In 2016, Sanders outperformed Clinton with young voters and voters who live in more rural places. He won primaries in states with sizable white populations like Michigan and Wisconsin — states that Clinton went on to lose in the general election to Trump. In the months and years following Clinton’s loss to Trump, Democrats have debated ways to win back this disillusioned group. Sanders could hold some appeal to those Obama-Trump voters given his primary performance in upper Midwest states and the fact that he did well with independents.

While Clinton won the 2016 primary by a substantial number of votes — more than 3 million — it’s safe to say the Democratic Party has gone through a bout of soul searching over the past couple of years. Voters who might have dismissed Sanders during the 2016 primary could well have come around to him in the interim. A Gallup survey found that 2016 was the first year in which Democrats felt more positively about socialism than they did about capitalism — Sanders’s message might well have seeped in. Another potential strength is his proven track record of attracting small-dollar donations. Sanders raised more than $100 million from donors giving less than $200 during the 2016 run, and in the 2020 campaign era, in which candidates are eschewing PAC money, that donor base is powerful.

Small donors gave big to Sanders

The five 2018 U.S. Senate candidates who raised the largest share of their donations from small donors as of Nov. 1, 2018

CANDIDATE PARTY STATE SHARE OF CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SMALL DONORS
Bernie Sanders I Vermont 77%
–
Elizabeth Warren D Massachusetts 56
–
Corey Stewart R Virginia 50
–
Beto O’Rourke D Texas 46
–
Geoff Diehl R Massachusetts 45
–
SOURCE: FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION VIA CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS

Sanders also may have a leg up in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where all-important local activists play an outsized role in building candidate momentum. Sanders knows them, and he won’t have to do as much as others to build up grassroots support.

But Sanders’s 2016 success could also be the makings of his greatest 2020 challenge. When he entered the race in 2015, it was in large part to push his progressive left ideas. Other politicians picked up on the fact that Democratic voters liked the big ideas that Sanders was selling, and now the 2020 field is packed with contenders who are campaigning on platforms similar to his 2016 campaign. Sanders’s 2017 “Medicare for all” bill became something of a litmus test for those senators considering a 2020 run — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren all signed on as co-sponsors. Even Clinton acknowledged the appeal in her campaign memoir, “What Happened”: “I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot.”

This means the progressive-left lane in 2020 is quite a bit more crowded than it was in 2016, which is a problem for Sanders, albeit a problem that stems from his own success. Warren is perhaps his most direct ideological competition — she’s been a critic of American capitalism for decades, though unlike Sanders, she still calls herself a capitalist and a Democrat. She also hired his 2016 Iowa caucus director — inside baseball to be sure, but it’s worth paying attention to the campaigns Democratic operatives choose to work for this early on.

Another potential complexifier for Sanders is that many Democrats appear to be prioritizing “electability” over ideology in 2020. A Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents wanted a candidate who will perform well against Trump, even if they disagree with that person on most issues. What electability actually means in this context is quite vague, but if it becomes a proxy for a centrist candidate palatable to swing voters, Sanders might be out of luck. Or, even if voters decide that “electable” means more left, Sanders could lose out to new faces trying to sell their pragmatic progressivism — Harris, Warren or potential candidate Beto O’Rourke. We might be wise not to discount voters’ affinity for these new, shiny candidates: 59 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll said they would be interested in “someone entirely new” as their nominee. Forty-one percent of those polled said Sanders shouldn’t even run again.

Sanders also would need to work to improve his performance with black voters, a crucial demographic in the Democratic primary.

In 2016, Clinton and Sanders split the white vote, but she did better among black voters overall, though young black voters trended toward Sanders. 2020 will likely be a whole different ballgame when it comes to courting the black vote. The field has two top-tier contenders who are black — Harris and Booker — and Joe Biden could hold some appeal given that he served as vice president under Barack Obama.

And then there is the matter of allegations of sexual harassment and gendered pay inequity that have been leveled against the Sanders campaign itself. Women who worked for the candidate in 2016 said there was a lack of accountability on the campaign when it came to the harassment, and Sanders’s initial response to the reporting was that he had been unaware of the allegations. “I was little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case,” he said. “If I run, we will do better next time.” Sanders issued a more full-throated apology via Twitter days later, but the allegations have served to compound the impression that there were whiffs of sexism swirling around the Sanders campaign and its supporters. “Bernie bros,” as some male supporters of Sanders came to be called, were sometimes blamed for sexist online attacks on Clinton.

From ABC News:

Clare Malone is a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight. @claremalone