Grumpy Tech Bro

Leadership Now on Popular Vote: “Business Brings Credibility”! More drops to come to expose all the state coalitions, business community leaders, and the elite universities behind the popular vote push. The Leadership Now Project discussion featured three participants with strong ties to the business community and election reform who advocated for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Marc Solomon serves as Senior Political Advisor at the Leadership Now Project. A nationally recognized strategist with 25 years of experience in strategy, campaign management, messaging, and coalition building, he was a central architect of the marriage equality movement as national campaign director for Freedom to Marry and the author of Winning Marriage. Solomon is a graduate of Yale University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. David Wenzel is a former finance and strategy executive who now focuses on political reform and reducing polarization. He writes regularly on about electoral reform, independents, and has been active in reform oriented circles. Marc Metzner, associated with the Yale School of Management and Election Reform Connections, is a retired consultant with roughly 25 years of experience building go to market and sales practices. He brings a business operations perspective to discussions of reform. The business community’s involvement was framed as a credibility multiplier. Metzner emphasized that the business community brings credibility to the project, which should inspire broader coalition building in support of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Dave Wenzel was candid about his own position. He explained that he was not very familiar with the compact going into the conversation, but he is excited to get behind the coalition because he hopes the larger business community will do the same and lend its weight to the effort. These comments align with Leadership Now’s model of mobilizing executives for democratic stability and with the post 2026 midterm landscape, in which several additional states now have unified Democratic control and could potentially soon push the compact closer to the 270 electoral vote threshold. Such arguments overlook the deliberate design of the Electoral College by the Framers of the Constitution. The Founders created the Electoral College precisely to prevent pure national majority rule and the tyranny of the majority that can arise under a system of direct popular election. They established a federal republic of states rather than a unitary democracy, requiring presidential candidates to secure support across diverse geographic and political interests instead of concentrating solely on the most populous regions. By allowing states to determine the manner of appointing electors, the Constitution preserved the role of the states as distinct political communities. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact seeks to circumvent this structure through coordinated state action that effectively converts the Electoral College into a rubber stamp for the national popular vote winner. Business leaders who promote the compact as a credibility enhancing reform therefore advance a mechanism that would extinguish the Founders’ safeguard against mob rule in favor of pure numerical majoritarianism.