National Popular Vote Compact Can Reach 270 From New Trifectas Only With Pennsylvania and Michigan

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact needs 48 more electoral votes to take effect, and among the five states outside it where Democrats won full control of government on 3 November, every combination that supplies 48 includes both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

That is this publication’s count, and it rests on two published lists. The compact’s sponsors, National Popular Vote, record 18 states and the District of Columbia as members, with 222 of the 270 electoral votes the agreement needs, on their state status page. The National Conference of State Legislatures, in its review of the results on 6 November, recorded six new Democratic trifectas, meaning one party holds the governorship and both legislative chambers: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Minnesota is already a member. The other five hold 61 electoral votes.

The figures are unofficial. NCSL said its tally would be updated as results were finalised.

What would joining do?

It would change how a member state appoints its presidential electors, not how anyone votes. Article II of the Constitution provides that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” Under Article III of the compact’s text, each member state’s certifying official would certify “the elector slate nominated in that state in association with the national popular vote winner,” whoever won the state itself. Article IV says the agreement takes effect only “when states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes” have enacted it and their enactments have taken effect. Below 270 it binds nobody, which is why it has never governed an election. The certified slates would then pass through the count Congress conducts in January, a procedure this publication described in September.

Which combinations reach 270?

Four, out of 31 possible. The table is this publication’s enumeration of every combination of the five new trifecta states, using the electoral-vote figures on the sponsors’ page; the compact history in the first table is from the sponsors’ state pages and NCSL.

No combination of three states works; the three largest, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, add 45. Every working combination needs four states, and two of them are always the same two. Pennsylvania is the larger of the two, and the one where the compact has never reached a floor vote.

Is a trifecta the same as a yes?

No, and Nevada is the record of the difference. The Nevada Legislature passed the compact as an ordinary bill, AB 186, in 2019: 23 to 17 in the Assembly on 16 April and 12 to 8 in the Senate on 21 May. Governor Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, vetoed it on 30 May, according to the sponsors’ Nevada page. In 2023 the legislature tried a constitutional amendment instead, AJR 6, which passed the Assembly 27 to 14 and the Senate 12 to 9. The amendment needed a second passage in 2025, as The Fulcrum noted, before it could go to voters; the sponsors did not ask the 2025 legislature for it, so the measure was not on the ballot this month.

On the schedule it followed last time, with passage in 2023 and 2025 and a vote in 2026, a restart in 2027 would put the amendment before voters in November 2030, after the next presidential election. That is this publication’s reading of the published sequence. If Nevada stays on that route for 2028, the only working combination left in the table is the four-state one without it: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, all four.

The partisan pattern is real but not a guarantee in either direction. “Because no Republican governor has ever signed the NPVIC, the compact’s survival and activation depend entirely on Democrats gaining or holding legislative trifectas,” Hugh Campbell wrote in The Fulcrum before the vote. The Sisolak veto shows that holding a trifecta is necessary on that logic and not sufficient. The veto is among the powers this publication has counted as a governor’s real ones, and here it decides the outcome as surely as a chamber does.

What stands in the way besides votes?

A constitutional argument and a calendar. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution bars a state, without the consent of Congress, from entering “into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” Opponents argue that clause reaches this one; the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine published an article this autumn under the title “The Unconstitutional Compact to Nullify the Electoral College.” Because the compact has never been in effect, it has never governed an election in which the question could be tested.

The calendar is in the compact itself. Article III applies only “in any year in which this agreement is, on July 20, in effect,” so for the 2028 election the enactments must have been passed, signed and in force in enough states by Thursday 20 July 2028, which is 619 days from today by our count. Article IV adds that a state’s withdrawal occurring “six months or less before the end of a President’s term” does not take effect until the next President or Vice President has qualified, which limits how late a state could leave once the agreement is live.

The first test is whether a compact bill is filed when the legislatures elected on 3 November convene. The deadline that governs 2028 is the one written into Article III: 20 July of that year.