If the popular vote determined election results, President Bush and President Trump wouldn't have won. Meet the man behind the popular vote legislation that's already been enacted in 14 states. ️
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We think the proper way is that the candidate who gets the most votes in the entire United States should become president.
00:15If you go back to the 2000 election, the election was decided by 537 votes in the state of Florida in an election where 120 some million people voted.
00:27In 2016, the margin by which Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was very small.
00:36So less than 80,000 people out of 137 million actually determined the election.
00:49There are a lot of myths as we call them.
00:52One is, for example, that the small states would be harmed by this legislation.
00:58But in fact, that's not true.
01:00Because in practice, 12 of the 13 smallest states, the ones with three and four electoral votes, are one-party states in presidential elections.
01:11And under the winner-take-all system, they get no attention whatsoever from presidential candidates.
01:17In 2012, 100% of the general election campaign visits were in 12 states.
01:23The other 38 states got no visits.
01:26And the campaign expenditures was accordingly concentrated in these 12 states.
01:34And that means that the president is focused on the issues important to those 12 states at the expense of the issues that are important to the other 38 states.
01:48In 2017, the presidential election was held in 12 states.
01:56We'll have to see what happens.
01:58If one or more of them don't, we'll go back to those states and try to be more convincing next year.
02:05And then there's a number of other states where we're actively working.
02:09And we hope to keep adding states.
02:12The strongest argument with the public is that the candidate with the most votes should win.
02:17And polls, even today, show substantial public support for that.