the comment on the constitution we need a vast majority of americans, already polls show consistently that more than 70% of americans want this so whether it's 270 electrical votes it's what we, need it seems like there's a lot of people who want this and i don't think it will necessarily be counter to what americans believe. (inaudible) >> so i don't think there's any doubt about, it but great panel, thank you. >> before you leave the next panel is even better, brianna clear i'm in, michael -- residents collar and jesse wag man up in the new york times editorial and bob cusack, so that is what's up next, thank you fju staying, cnn.

it is my pleasure to introduce bob kyslyak the editor-in-chief of the hill. -- he will moderate a panel on how well candidates messages and the platforms change with the popular vote. bob. >> thanks jim. i want to introduce our panel. michael

steele, former chair of the rnc. the anna coren, and jesse blackmon a new york times editorial board. i was looking back at the states that we visited most by donald trump and hillary clinton in the last election. not surprised -- florida, pennsylvania. clinton visited wisconsin a bit more. the first question would be if we did change the system, all start with you, what would be the impact of campaign in the strategy. as you mentioned bob this with the large states i was kind of amused when senator cramer of north dakota defending the electric college said this would make north dakota irrelevant. guess what? when it comes to presidential politics, north dakota is irrelevant right now. let's say we had a presidential election that was looking close in terms of popular votes. then every

vote would count and candidates would have an incentive to try to maximize the turnout even in places like north dakota. one of the things when we dissected hillary clinton's loss, one of the things that kept coming up was not whether she visited pennsylvania or michigan, but the analytics said go to the places where your votes are. instead of going to places where she lost 80-20, or she might have moved it to 60-40 and made a difference, they ignore those areas. the smart thing to do is go everywhere and make sure you can get votes, even in places and counties and states you would lose. what we would see is television ads like places in north dakota, which are very cheap. you would see a ground campaign because

if you are going to lose as richard nixon >> did in 1960, 1 vote per precinct, and if you know you can shift two votes per precinct and you could win, you would go everywhere. the paradox is the major defense of the electoral college gives club to small states is wrong. small states would have much more clout in the world we live in if we had a national popular vote. >> you have been in the war rooms of campaigns, in presidential elections, other than the primaries, do states like north dakota, are they even discussed? >> no, they are not. you do measure how much money you get out of north dakota because it becomes a donor state, like my home state

f you are a, like my home state republican, you only come to maryland if you want to have a fundraiser, you would not go there to campaign for votes. that is an important thing to understand. the way the system is designed to the electoral college, what we have wound up doing is we are not holding elections in the united states of america. we are holding elections in the battleground states of america. you're only talking in any given presidential cycle between eight and 10 states that the campaigns give a about, because the rest of it is flyover or donor. you're not going to take the time or spend the money. you are going to concentrate on those winner take all states that you need, as dictated by the current political cycle or other things that you look at and say, michigan in the last

cycle would have been a battleground state is hillary took it for granted and donald- trump did not. that speaks to the nature of this particular effort. it does open up the prospects, it forces candidates to have to attention to every state because every state becomes important. if i am running for president as a republican, all of a sudden california is equally important to me as my home state of maryland, or florida, or ohio. why? i am about getting my vote. i might lose the vote in california, but that vote is now added to a bigger number that will help me in a national campaign. we talk a lot about

national races here in the united states, this is a national campaign, national polling, at the end of the day, polling only cares about a handful of states and if you're not one of the states you wont see the benefit. my friend during the talk during the 2008 cycle, michigan was a big player until the mccain campaign decided to pull out. committee conclusion it was no longer relevant. it was relevant to all of the races in michigan at the time. the impact of that premature removal from the race resulted in losses not just of the state by the presidential candidate, there are connections beyond just the presidential and why making a platform >> available to every voter, everyone gets to play and -- >> everyone up and down the

system benefits from it. >> if we went to a national popular vote, how would it affect voter turnout? i spoke to republicans in maryland who said my vote does not count in the presidential race. a lot of people feel that way. would it help it significantly? >> i absolutely believe it would. one of the key reasons why people don't turn out to vote is because they feel like their vote doesn't matter. it is in apathy that continues to grow. campaigns are not reaching out to you and it is a vicious cycle that continues. virginia is a good example. in 2000, virginia was solidly republican so nobody hosted any events there. flash forward to 2016, virginia is a contested state.

you saw 23 presidential events there. individuals in virginia ended up turning out more. you had about 66% turnout in virginia, up from 2000. states like texas that are traditionally considered state, considered safe, there was turnout around 50%. >> just to follow up, critics say the candidates would just go to the big cities. >> right. i think it is definitely an increase ow becausenitely an increase candidates completely ignore 40 or so states. they are just solely focusing on 10 battleground states like michigan, pennsylvania and wisconsin. if we switch to the national popular vote, you would have to reach out to more individuals in more diverse areas. the current system foregoes about 80% of the electorate. >> you have a book

coming ouá in the spring on this. what did you hear from people on this topic? >> it is interesting, the book looks at the history of the electoral college and attempts to change it over the years but i end with a chapter of talking to campaign managers and field directors from the past 20 or so years from both republican and democratic campaigns. what was fascinating to me was almost to a person, they all wanted a national popular vote. >> both sides? >> both sides. there were a couple exceptions, you can buy the book to find out about. >> the vast majority understood how this warps american democracy. one of the thing that is interesting to me

is in a previous panel, a professor was talking about a risk the one in three risk that a person who wins the popular vote nationally does not become president. i was like, why are we calling that a risk? if the electoral college defenders are right and this is a system that is there for a good reason and it was put there by the framers of the constitution and has been with us for more than two centuries, why is that a risk? i think the answer is pretty obvious. nobody feels that that is a legitimate way to elect a president. republicans would not feel that way for happened to them and democrats have not felt that way when it happened to them. campaigns understand this. they don't want to campaign in battleground states, but they do it because it is politically smart. they have l)sráed time and money and they are not stupid. they know they have to spend it in ways that

maximizes their chances of winning under the system we have right now. in contrast, if you have a popular vote, you would have a system in which as all the other panelists have been saying candidates would be free to go to the places where the votes were and that does not just mean big cities. one interesting piece of research i have seen comes from the national popular vote, these are people that have been running the compact that have been gaining steam. what happens in battleground states right now is a proxy for a national popular vote. we are speculating on how the national popular vote election would run. there is a pretty good answer to that and that is we can see it happening in states. battleground states are elections in which every single vote counts the same and the person who gets the most votes wins. that is what a national

popular vote is. how do campaigns render >> elections in battleground states? they go everywhere. every campaign manager i spoke to said this, this is campaigning 101, you don't just live in the cities, you go everywhere. if 30% of the population lives in urban areas, you spend 30% of your time there. it happens again and again and you see it in every battleground state, i think that is a pretty good illustration of what we would see with the popular vote election. >> it is not just where you would go and spend the dollars, it is how you would campaign. in our tribal iced, polarized time, there is no incentive to reach out to people on the other side. if you are trying to get every vote, and we are talking about moving into rural areas, democrats would have an

incentive to be more sensitive to the issues and concerns of rural voters. they would change the rhetoric and possibly change some policies. michael talked about california, we now have a national republican campaign led by the >> president in a war against california, trying to undermine everything california is doing. if you are out to get a sizable number of votes in california, you are not going to do that. it is not just whether you are going to pay attention to the states by campaigning and putting in money, you are going to change the way you talk and your policies at a time we desperately need those changes. >> you are on tv all the time, how would the media, how would it change how the media covers campaigns? >> that is a very good question. the media has various stress tests they go through to figure out where they want to send their people. which states they want to concentrate their time, very

much the way campaigns do. you are looking at the value added. am i going to spend time in north dakota? when the candidate is just going there to do a flyover or a donor to do a olyover or a donor be no, they are not. if that candidate is actually going to go there and campaign and spent time, what i think you would see is the media would have to adapt their strategies, as well, because their goal is to follow the candidates, right? and to report the news they are making or not making. i think you will see some change in how the on ground reporters do their job and where they go in the decisions their editors will be making, in terms of their assignments and where they send them. this idea would now open up all 50 states as a voter playground is a fascinating and important one, i think. if we really believe the system should allow for everyone to vote and every vote to matter and every fault account. you either believe that or you don't. this notion that candidates

this notion that candidates under a national popular vote would somehow concentrate their time in urban centers is just silly. the person who said that or thinks that has never run a campaign or been a candidate. you are not going to get votes if 50% of your population you go after his in one place and you leave the other 50% to your competitors, what you think it's going to happen to you? you're not going to win. the 50% you are concentrated on is still split up. no candidate corners the market on every vote in a jurisdiction. that is

why we opened this process up and you say to the voters, you are now in play. those candidates will take note of that and the media has to follow that, they will follow the script, they will follow where the news lines take them and they will follow where the candidates begin to take some noise. sticking with the california example, if you get a republican candidate that sees a bump in the numbers, they are behind but they are competitive in california, you don't think the press is going to cover that story? they are going to cover that story. what happens? that feeds the narrative downstream. it is how the system is set up now. what do we >> anchor our presidential elections on? two states. iowa and new hampshire. >> you have people writing stories that if you don't win iowa or new hampshire, your campaign is over. tell that to the people running in places like california and florida. the idea is to open the process

up a lot more, to engage the voters for sure, but to bring those other components in the process, the media and the political system, in line with what voters are doing. >> you travel the country and talk to young voters, what are you hearing on this issue and which communities are underrepresented the most? >> traditionally, it is communities of color and other marginalized groups that have been underrepresented in our electoral process. these students of color live in california and feel their vote doesn't matter. they live in texas, which has been considered a safe state. you definitely feel asyou definitely feel as if these candidates don't represent your values. much to what mike hope analysts were saying as far as

candidates focusing on battleground states, they focus on fringe voters in these battleground states for a slim margin >> so they can win battleground votes. if you care about the millions of people living in california or texas as you would in a popular vote, you would have to change the narrative of your candidacy. you would not be able to win on a racist agenda. >> we were talking about some history backstage about in 2000, which i remember at the time was amazing that there was no violence after the contested election. everyone >> thought maybe it would flip, that gore would become president but bush would win the popular vote and we saw the flip of that. in 2004, it was important for the bush team to win the popular vote, which they did. the question is, do you think donald trump will focus on the national popular vote in 2020? >> it depends on what day you ask him. >> trump has said he

has won the popular vote, that he would have won the popular vote is millions of illegal voters had not cast their ballots and he would win the popular vote if he campaigned differently. i don't know what donald trump's position on the popular vote is today. going back to what jim quoted at the beginning of the event, he quoted that electoral democracy the old the electoral college is a disaster for democracy. the reason he tweeted it is it looked briefly as the early returns were coming in like barack obama would win the electoral college and mitt romney woul" win the popular vote. all it takes is the hint that this might flip for people to get upset about the system we have now. what you are referring to are the 2000 and 2004 elections and that is constructive. before the 2000 election, there is reporting that that election was looking like it might go the other way.

there was a lot of reporting that there might be a split election in 2000 before the vote but it would go the other way. people thought george w. bush would win the popular vote but lose the electoral college. there is reporting that some people in george w. bush's campaign were working on a strategy for a public push to get the electors to go with the popular vote winner and say the electoral college was from the 18th century and what we need is a president elected by all the people. obviously, they did not have to take that route,

but four years later, because they lost the popular vote, the bush campaign team became perhaps the only campaign team that actively sought to win the popular vote. no other campaign probably ever has or should go for the popular vote if those are the rules, it would be politically crazy. they understood how important it was for him to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the country after what happened in 2000. he ended up winning by 3 million votes, which was hillary clinton's margin in 2016. >> this goes to what the other panelists have been saying, in reference to california, that is a great example. california, you know how we people voted for california voted for donald trump in california? four and a half million people and not a single one of them mattered.

because of the winner take all rule, which is what came up in the last session. it's at the heart of the inequity that is created by our current electoral college system. 4. 5 million people is more than hillary clinton's entire national margin, none of those people counted. it is important to remember that how we more people this is from the perspective of turnout and involvement how many more people would feel involved in feel like a mattered under a popular vote. she mentioned communities of color, were right >> now there are a lot of people who just don't count. throughout the south, african-american voters have not seen their vote represented

by a single electoral vote in generations. all of the sudden, have a popular vote and black voters in the south would matter just as much as white voters in wyoming and north dakota and west virginia. it completely alters how a campaign happens. >> to that point, which is really the heart of it, when you are candidate's perspective, your entire engagement changes because for play 5 million voters out of california 4. 5 million voters out of california are added to a goal you are trying to reach. those voters on the ground have something if you want some skin in the game. we know the frustration of west coast voters. elections are called as they are getting off of work.

their incentive is to go home and have dinner. anything after 5:00 does not matter. there is another three hours of poll time going on. you are not going to win my state, my vote does not count, it does not matter, i am going to dinner. now it is a different ballgame. you have a turnout machine from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in california. now you have the early return, you notice coming, we get our returns at noon, at 5:00, so we have a sense of what is going on on the east coast. the west coast is a second thought if considered at all. i have spoken to enough california legislators and candidates to know, particularly if they are republican, what their day is like on election day. they kind of stop after >> 5:00. it is a huge way to incentivize the voters into re-engaging the system in a way we have not, ever. >> all now every vote is

everunning and i every vote is am going to add that vote to the votes i am getting on the east coast, the south and the midwest and i am going to cobble together my majority vote by tapping into every precinct and every voter in the country. >> that also affects congressional elections. i need that voter who is going to dinner who might have voted for me. >> just to follow-up up on your question, donald trump is the first president, probably ever, who has o'ly focused on a base and reinforcing a base and not caring about the nation as a whole, or trying to even make a pretense to broaden that out. believing that the distortions of the electoral college give him leverage, and three or four days he is going to minneapolis, you know it will be the rodent

infested rhetoric we have seen before. there are two goals here, one is to put minnesota in play >> which he came close to winning. this is my home state. if we were looking at a national popular vote, i think the whole premise of his rhetoric and his policy would have to adjust if we assume he is #ocused not just on making more money while he is president, but winning reelection. you are going to be careful about what kind of rhetoric you will use in minnesota because you might turn out even more of those voters who are appalled by that rhetoric. to go back to california, we have these

devastating forest fires and trump basically dismissed it but made sure that federal aid did not go to california. you are not going to do that if you are out to maximize your vote in >> california because you needed to compete for the national popular vote. it changes an awful lot of the calculus of not just candidates, but a president, if you suddenly have to look at the world in a completely different way. >> that brings up an interesting perspective. you are talking about minnesota. in 2016, michigan and pennsylvania were top^states that helped solidify the candidacy for the president. with that perspective in mind, those states are over 80% white. if we switched to a national popular vote, people would have to change their narrative and how they court diverse voters

so they are appealing to the moderate, not just extreme individuals who are representative of one demographic. >> you mention something i think is key >> that i appreciate and want to put into context, that is the behavior of not only candidates but certainly incumbent presidents when it comes to where they are going to put federal resources in a presidential campaign. during the obama years, we had a hurricane that came into the gulf and the posture of the administration was one of we are going to watch it, we are going to watch it, we are going to watch it, we are going to watch it, then it shifted to the western coast and florida and we have to do something about this and make sure resources are are available. why? because the battleground state of florida is important that we let the people on the ground know we have your back, more so than the people in louisiana or elsewhere. how these resources get allocated

is also a factor. it is not just the vote, per se. it is also the federal dollars and how they are spent in presidential cycles by incumbents and the promises that are made by candidates that are running to sort of let people know, i have your back, i am with you. whether it is federal aid on education, no child left behind, was a program out of the bush years. medicare part d, who was that for? >> you can begin to contextualize and understand exactly how all of this fits together. by undoing that system in a way that makes it more competitive, exposes the entire country to those very

same resources and the very same level of scrutiny the candidates give florida or ohio, and iowa, whatever, you do a big service for the people of the country as a whole. >> i think that is an excellent õpoint and we could go down the list, disaster declarations are particularly upsetting because this is a time when americans are actually in need and sometimes their lives are in danger, so playing politics with that is particularly outrageous. but just in a normal course of business, presidential control funding and in some cases legislation, it is harder to pin down because there are different factors about why a bill passes congress. the medicare example, george w. bush gets that passed. last i checked, republicans were not fans of

massive government entitlement programs. but who does it help? ot of elderly people. whereelp? they live? a lot of them live in florida. both parties do this. this is not a republican game. what was one of president obama's first major actions? to bailout the auto industry. the steel tariffs. you can go down the line and find a correlation between the kind of decisions between the ith theirecisions money, the money they control and where the battleground states are. this is not to say those are legitimate needs, this is not to sit none of that matters, it is to say the overbearing focus on those parts of the country is a distortion of american democracy and if the presidents looked at the nation as a whole and the need to win support

everywhere, the decisions where money went would be more in line of what the nation needed as a whole. >> >> michael, you are a republican, you are not a fan of the president. the republicans say to you privately, why do you support this? we are not going to win the national popular vote. >> it is interesting. not really. it is something i think in particular would you look at recently, and certainly working with it and being involved with national popular vote, and being in a room with republican legislators who are conscientiously looking at this and consider it and weighing it and taking up legislation in their chambers, not just from a minority position, but being in one knows demographically, andt-

otherwise how the country is changing. we want to be competitive, we want to be able to win in places that we once won, like california or states in the west. when you look in areas close to me, virginia, which was a solidly red state. now it is not. you have to look at these realities and say, how do we compete on this new battleground that is being formed? a lot of republicans you do have some thatbut for if we had this, hillary clinton would have been president. that argument does not stand up. folks are looking through such a narrow prism. i thoug$t they would at first, but that has not been my experience. they see it as a way to address what is coming changes in the

country. they would like everyone in their community devote, as well, because that ultimately benefits them. the one thing i have always said to republicans and i was a county chairman, state chairman, national chairman, never be afraid of the voter and never be afraid to put out the policies, the values and the positions you believe in, because that is ultimately what they are going to gravitate toward. >> it won't change the

underlying requirement and that is to talk to voters, you have to make a case and you could do what you want with gerrymandering and voter suppression, but at the end of the day, you still have to confront the voter. i think a lot more republican legislators, particularly at the state level, see that you're coming around to the idea of elevating this idea of a national popular vote. >> in a 2012, after the republican loss, the chair of the republican party the time commission his famous autopsy, quite a word to use for your party. it turns out in some ways to be a more accurate word. remember, that was basically, oh my god, we are losing the demographic battle, we need to change, we need to do something on immigration. i think it was an inadequate response and that autopsy, it was basically pass a comprehensive immigration bill and we are fine. it was he who as chief of staff ripped the autopsy up and threw it in the wastebasket and they moved in a different direction. imagine if you have to compete as a party for the national popular vote with a different set of circumstances, or you are going to have to compete much more

widely. you were not only going to push for a comprehensive immigration bill but you are going to change the rhetoric you use about immigrants. you are going to have to look at a broader range of policies you can change so you can compete for minority votes. it alters ore waysrity votes. it alters but i think we have been thinking about. if you are going to compete as a national party, you are going to have to focus >> on solving problems for people in the country instead of inciting discord and division. if we are looking at a panacea and there is no panacea for what is in a norma's cultural divide and now something that is much worse, but if we are looking for something that can alter the landscape of our politics and governance, this is where you start. >> to really build of

what he mentioned, we would actually see a policy agenda that is more representative of our communities, so you are not >> just focusing on extreme voters that would put you across the edge in michigan and pennsylvania. you would actually see real policy reform that focuses on the everyday citizen. you would see people focusing on gun violence, border security and the way to stop separating families because that is what your base is made out of. you would have a larger base you would have to cater to not just a certain base that is not representative of the united states as a whole. >> this points to two things. one is the answer to republicans who said, we would lose the popular vote, yes, if

you continue down this path of racism, xenophobia, you will. the country is changing and you are aiming for a smaller slice of it. that is not the only direction you can go. a popular vote forces parties into a broader to approach a broader constituency. that is really the key here. the way we select our presidents in the way we design our electoral system shapes the kind of candidates we get. it is not just policy, it is candidates. you would not end up with certain types of candidates who could not speak to a broader coalition of people on both the left and the right. >> we look very divided right now but i think there are candidates in both parties who could speak a lot more effectively to a much broader swath of americans if they had

too of americans if they had to. >> you see the conversation right now, the democrats are going through their primary. you have a great (ressure within that primary system right now between the more progressive candidates, bernie sanders, elizabeth warren, and the more traditional democrats, even folks like a kamala harris and a pete buttigieg to some extent, but certainly joe biden and amy klobuchar. you have a tension. one of the effects i think i am very curious about in terms of how it ultimately plays out, i think it does p&ay out this way our primary system will change, too. our primaries are aimed at toward the lowest common denominator. only this

much of our entire voter pool will show up and vote. you are driven by the energy and those positions. they are maybe anti-immigrant or wanting to take away private health care. you have this system in which everything is forced into a very narrow tunnel and a primary and then you have to open it up into a general and you see candidates trying to pivot and backstroke and sway and move to deal with a broader electric, which is looking at an election and going, you are going to do what with my health care and what'd you say about immigrants? it becomes something were a candidate running for national office and i think it will be true for statewide offices, as well we will pay more attention to how they make that case. right now, our candidates make the case for iowa, new hampshire, nevada and south carolina, right? under this system, they would have to make the case for all other 46 states and let people

know, i am coming out to california next week, i hear >> you. i will be in missouri afteri will be in missouri after that, i will be in tennessee, and they become well-rounded, they become better versed, you'll get a lot of bubble up from the state level of issues so it's not just california being the leading edge and policy and it changed at the state level. i think, overall, it will refashion the way candidates not only behave in terms of getting votes, >> but addressing issues. >> we are going to open it up the questions in about five minutes. i remember john mccain was a straight shooter with the media and at one point he said ethanol was a joke and that did not help him in iowa so then he had to backtrack and he finished fourth in iowa. it does show how that can affect policies of candidates. you study this issue and mentioned

backstage there was a vote in congress decades ago, where do you see this movement and what is the history? >> we think of issue as with almost everything else in america. for most of american history, there has been no partisan ship to how we elect the president. the most influential members of the convention in philadelphia wanted a popular vote for president. that is james madison, james wilson, these are the people we generally identify with framing the essence of the constitution. they wanted a popular vote, they could not get it. there are a lot of reasons for that, which i will not go into here, including slavery, including the fight at the time between smaller states and bigger states, which was not as big of a fight as you might think. there were other concerns about

what people could learn about the national office. going all the way through and up into what bob was referring to, in the 1960's, at the height of the civil rights movement, most people don't remember that this happened, but there was a concerted effort to abolish the electoral college and replace it with a popular vote in the 1960's. in 1969, the house of representatives passed a bill to abolish the electoral college by 82%, easily clearing the threshold for an amendment. it got to the senate, it looks like they might have the votes, the states were on board. 80% of the public wanted a popular vote for president. it gets bottled up in the senate. you know who bottled up in the senate? strom thurmond, sam

ervin, the same people who were filibustering the civil rights act earlier. they know where their bread is buttered. they blocked it until it died in the senate and it never went anywhere. at the time, it had the support of richard nixon, george h. w. bush, it later had the support of bob dole, this was not a partisan issue because people fundamentally understood that majority rule was the essential foundation of democracy. i think it is unfortunate that all of the splits have gone in one direction as i think the professor pointed out in the last session. it does not necessarily have to go that way and we have seen republican presidents as recently as george w. bush winning by a substantial margin in the popular >> vote. since 2002, which is only 17 years ago, 47 states have elected republican governors. republicans don't

have trouble winning popular vote's. it is a misunderstanding of how the incentive structures of our system have worked, how campaigning happens and how that led to the kind of candidates we have, and that made people think republicans can't win a popular vote. i think that is a misunderstanding. >> >> we will open it up for questions. if you can raise your hand, the mic will come to you. please keep your questions short. >> this is somewhat hypothetical, but given the current president's limited popularity in our country, if all the sudden a popular vote went into effect for the 2020 election, do you think there would be more interest from the republican party in considering

alternative candidates? >> presumably by that point, the cutoff date under the compact would be july. if it happened around that time, then pretty much your primary season is done. if it happens before that, the remaining states coming into the pack, let's say it happened in february or march during the legislative sessions. you have three candidates in there already. it would change the dynamic of how they would run. given the window they would have. again, the question of how it would play out in a primary situation is a little bit gray, i think. we don't know how many

candidates we would get in, we would get out, how donald trump himself would articulate his campaign at that point. he has said if there were a national popular vote in 2016, i would have been in californiai would have campaigned differently. he recognizes how he would have to change out of the more traditional electoral college model into a national popular vote model in terms of a general election. what it would do in a primary, i think that would be a matter of timing of when the compact is fulfilled and the states are in. >> later in the process, it would have an impact j)q primary. earlier in the process, it probably would. either way, i think donald trump would campaign differently, regardless. >> hello, i am wondering if you could say something about the strategy for achieving in enough states and what you think is the

biggest obstacles to achieving the 270 electoral votes? >> i spent a good time talking with the people with the compact effort and they are a mix of democrats and republicans who have been doing this for over a decade and they spent a huge amount of time going state to state and working with legislators. if not convincing all of them to try to reduce some of the knee-jerk opposition. they have passed in several houses, i can be corrected on this if some of the members are here today, it has passed at least one house in several republican states, including oklahoma i am trying to think of the others. georgia, and one or two others. there

was a sense that before the split election in 2016, they were on the cusp of getting it enacted in georgia, utah, arizona, in states that are trending purple and their republican leadership there saying, oh, if we don't do this now we will suddenly be on the wrong side of winner take all rules. convincing people in republican led states i am trying to avoid using red and blue because it is a harmful way of looking at our country, like a state only has republicans or democrats in it. all states are purple states. in states that have a majority of republicans, how do you convince them it is a good thing? part of it gets back to your question, a sense of, we are going to lose the popular vote. that is what everyone cares about in the end. they want what will help their candidate win. >> if you can convince people it is up for grabs, i think you can start to win over the

republican-controlled states. those last 74 electoral votes will be a heavier left than the first 190 six. 196. how you convince republican lawmakers to adopt the compacted on the surface looks like something that would hurt them. >> some of my conversations with folks, one of the things folks are congress of aware of is the things that are occurring. states that were for example comfortably red, or certainly comfortably i guess

republican-controlled. texas is demographically changing.