The challenge for continuing the American Experiment is recovering from the "Second Gilded Age" (1980s to the present). As of early 2026, the U.S. national debt is 122% to 125% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This situation has been exacerbated since 2000, when the U.S. national debt as a percentage of GDP was 33% to 35%. Americans can attribute this worsening situation to two non-popular vote presidents, Bush-43 and Trump-45. Directly, during their terms, and indirectly, with the aftermath of the 2008 Great recession and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 1894, toward the end of the 19th century “Gilded Age," the U.S. national debt was approximately 7% of gross domestic product GDP.
Minority rule occurs when a numerical or ideological minority holds the power to consistently thwart the will of the majority or govern over them. It thrives through the coordinated reinforcement of specific electoral, institutional, and legal mechanisms.
The extension of the "second Gilded Age" was achieved through several interconnected mechanisms of minority rule, which shielded hyper-concentrated wealth and corporate power from democratic accountability, as follows:
Minoritarian rule of the winner-take-all (WTA) electoral college: Because 48 states allocate all electoral votes to the statewide winner, a candidate can secure the presidency while losing the popular vote. This enables the election of administrations that prioritize corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, even when the broader electorate demands reform.
Electoral manipulation: Once institutions are in place, the mechanisms of voting can be altered to ensure the ruling minority maintains an electoral advantage.
Partisan gerrymandering: Lawmakers manipulate district boundaries to pack opposition voters into a few districts or spread them out thinly, allowing the minority party to retain a governing majority of seats despite winning fewer total votes statewide.
Voter suppression: Stricter voting regulations—such as rigid voter ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and the reduction of early voting—disproportionately restrict access for minority communities and lower-income voters.
Institutional counter-majoritarianism: certain governing structures are explicitly designed to over-represent specific geographic or demographic groups at the expense of population equality.
Malapportionment of legislatures: In systems like the U.S. Senate, low-population rural states receive the same representation as highly populated urban centers. This allows a minority of the population to block national legislation.
Legislative obstruction: Minority groups utilize built-in procedural hurdles within deliberative bodies to stop majority action.
The Filibuster: In legislative chambers, this rule requires supermajorities (e.g., 60 out of 100 votes) to pass routine legislation or end debate. This allows a minority of legislators to veto the entire legislative agenda.
Judicial entrenchment: When the ruling minority controls the executive and legislative branches, they can appoint lifetime judges who share their ideological preferences.
Counter-Majoritarian Courts: Appointed judges can use the power of judicial review to overturn laws passed by the majority, strike down civil rights protections, and further enable restrictive voting and campaign finance laws.
Money in politics and concentrated wealth allows well-funded, organized interest groups to exert outsized influence over the political process compared to the general populace.
Dark Money: Unregulated or anonymous campaign contributions allow a wealthy few to fund sympathetic candidates, lobby for specific policies, and run mass media campaigns that shift the political agenda.
From a fiscal standpoint, America can ill afford another non-popular vote president. While the Constitution allows state legislatures to determine the method of elector selection, the Framers did not mandate the winner-take-all electoral college system currently used by 48 states. This system concentrates campaign attention on a few "swing states" while rendering millions of votes in "safe states" effectively irrelevant.
Few would deny that minority rule is the proverbial “can of worms” to remedy; however, the prevention of a future non-popular vote president will potentially reduce institutional counter-majoritarianism of the U.S. Senate and the counter-majoritarian courts.
Reducing the influence of money pouring into presidential politics since the 2010 Citizens United decision may actually be possible by addressing the WTA structure of the electoral college. By changing how electoral votes are allocated, the incentive to concentrate money in a few swing states could be reduced.
The winner-take-all feature of the electoral college narrows the focus of massive campaign expenditures in a “Funnel Effect” to a handful of closely divided battleground states. Because candidates have little to gain from spending in states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind, they concentrate all their financial resources on 15 or 16 states, or in some cycles, as few as seven key swing states. All this could change if the "battleground state" phenomenon were taken away from the wealthy, as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) would accomplish.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is a pragmatic, state-based initiative designed to ensure that the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes across fifty states and the District of Columbia wins the presidency. It aims to achieve this without requiring a constitutional amendment, operating instead within the existing electoral college framework by utilizing states' constitutional authority to appoint electors. If enough states join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) to reach 270 electoral votes, the United States will effectively shift from a WTA regime to a national popular vote system for electing the President.
As of early 2026, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been adopted by seventeen states and the District of Columbia, which collectively hold 209 electoral votes. The compact requires 270 electoral votes (a majority of the 538 total) to take effect. It currently needs sixty-one more electoral votes to become active.
Legislative elections will be held on November 3, 2026, for eighty-eight state legislative chambers in forty-six states. In 2026, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) will be a relevant issue in several state elections, particularly in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As the compact needs sixty-one more electoral votes to hit the 270-vote threshold, these purple or contested states are key battlegrounds where legislative control could determine whether they join the 18 jurisdictions already signed on.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
