...The Electoral College was never some dusty antique that outlived its purpose. Delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention rejected a direct national popular vote because it would let a handful of population centers dictate terms to everyone else. They rejected congressional selection because it bred backroom deals. They settled on an electoral framework tied to each state’s congressional delegation, and most states adopted winner-take-all allocation. The system forced candidates to build genuinely national coalitions and functioned across 60 presidential elections because it respected federalism. As Justice Antonin Scalia observed consistently, structural safeguards are not obstacles to self-governance — they are its architecture.
The map that cable news panels studiously avoid tells the real story. In 2024, Donald Trump carried 2,660 counties. His opponent won roughly 451 — concentrated in the dense urban cores of Los Angeles, Cook County, New York City, and a tight cluster of others. Those 2,660 counties grow the food, drill the energy, manufacture the goods, and raise the next generation. Under a pure popular-vote regime, a few metropolitan counties can arithmetically drown all of them. I coached high school track and field athletes for years. You do not let two or three sprinters dictate the entire meet while every other field competitor gets written off. There is no honest democratic rationale for letting a handful of zip codes decide for 330 million people.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jay-rogers/2026/05/03/counties-not-capitals-the-npvic-threat-and-the-case-for-a-real-electoral-reset-n2675396
