Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered what he apparently intended to be a crowd-pleasing applause line at a town hall event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, suggesting that the United States should abolish the Electoral College and select its president based on the national popular vote. The crowd at Will Rogers High School, there for Buttigieg’s “Win the Era” town hall, responded enthusiastically. The rest of the country responded by pointing out the most inconvenient fact in American presidential election history: Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the national popular vote in 2024, meaning Buttigieg’s proposed reform would not only have kept Trump in the White House but would have changed nothing about the outcome he was implicitly lamenting.
Buttigieg stated the proposal in terms that made it sound like a revolutionary democratic reform. “One of the other things I’m going to do, and I may be foolish in doing it, is I’m going to make a heavy play for New York, heavy play for New Jersey, heavy play for Virginia, heavy play for New Mexico, and a heavy play for a state that hasn’t been won in years, Minnesota,” he said, previewing a potential 2028 campaign strategy. Then came the line that went viral: “But one thing that would make a huge difference is if we selected our president by letting the person who got the most votes actually take the office instead of the National Electoral College. It would be a really good idea, because then any Democrat wanting to be president would have to campaign in Oklahoma.”
There is just one problem with Buttigieg’s framing, and it is not a minor one. Trump won the 2024 presidential election by 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226, a decisive Electoral College margin. But Trump also won the national popular vote, defeating Harris by approximately two million votes. He became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, ending a 20-year drought for the Republican Party in the popular vote column. Under Buttigieg’s proposed reform, Donald Trump would still be the President of the United States. Nothing would have changed.
The social media response was immediate, merciless, and bipartisan in its amusement. Pollster Frank Luntz, not exactly a Trump enthusiast, posted on X: “If we did this, the President of the United States would currently be Donald Trump.” Conservative commentator Eric Daugherty posted: “Donald J. Trump would still be your president, check the scoreboard.” Steve Guest, a Republican communications operative, wrote: “Pete Buttigieg thinks everyone is so stupid that they don’t know who won the popular vote as well as the electoral college in 2024. It was President Donald Trump.” The ratio on those posts was, appropriately, enormous.
Townhall’s Matt Vespa was characteristically blunt in his analysis, writing that Mayor Pete’s Electoral College remarks show he still does not know his way around basic electoral math. He noted that notice how Democrats and liberal media folks did not complain about the Electoral College after Trump’s 2024 win, because he also won the popular vote, leaving them with nothing to argue about since the Republicans crushed the Democratic Party. The observation is accurate. The post-2024 Democratic complaint about the Electoral College never fully materialized precisely because Trump’s popular vote victory removed the one argument that gave the anti-Electoral College case its emotional force.
The Electoral College argument has been a Democratic rallying cry since 2000, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore while losing the national popular vote. It was revived with great intensity after 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote by approximately three million votes.
In both cases, the argument had a coherent factual foundation: the winning candidate had received fewer total votes than the losing candidate. Neither of those situations is analogous to 2024, when Trump won more votes than Harris nationally by a margin of approximately two million.
Buttigieg appeared either to have forgotten that fact entirely or to have assumed his Tulsa audience had forgotten it. Neither assumption reflects well on a man who is widely presumed to be testing the waters for a 2028 presidential run and who has built his political brand on being the smart, thoughtful alternative to the bombast of other political figures.
Being the candidate who proposes abolishing the Electoral College and then is reminded by the entire internet that doing so would not have changed who won the last election is not the profile of a political genius.
The Electoral College has always served a purpose that the Founding Fathers understood clearly and that Buttigieg’s proposal would eliminate: it prevents the most populous metropolitan areas from completely dominating national presidential elections. Without the Electoral College, presidential campaigns would concentrate entirely on New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and a handful of other massive urban centers. Voters in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the city where Buttigieg chose to make his Electoral College speech, would become even less relevant to presidential politics than they currently are. The irony of making an anti-Electoral College argument in a state that would be rendered further into the margins under the system he is proposing was apparently lost on the audience at Will Rogers High School, if not on the rest of the country.
Buttigieg’s stated argument that abolishing the Electoral College would force presidential candidates to campaign in Oklahoma is also factually backwards. Under the current system, presidential candidates must assemble enough electoral votes from enough states to reach 270, which creates a structural incentive to contest a geographically diverse range of states.
Under a pure popular vote system, the incentive is to maximize total votes, which means running up the score in already-friendly dense urban populations rather than competing in less populated states. Buttigieg’s proposed reform would make presidential candidates less likely to go to Oklahoma, not more likely.
Trump himself previewed the aggressive map expansion that the Electoral College incentivized before the 2024 election. He told Breitbart News before Election Day that he intended to make heavy plays for New York, New Jersey, Virginia, New Mexico, and Minnesota, precisely because the Electoral College rewards winning additional states rather than simply running up margins in states already decided.
Under the popular vote system Buttigieg is proposing, Trump’s strategists would have advised him to simply maximize margins in Texas, Florida, and other red states rather than attempting to expand the map. The Electoral College produced a more competitive and geographically diverse campaign. The popular vote system would have produced a more regionally concentrated one.
The 2028 dimension of the Buttigieg town hall tour deserves examination. He told Reverend Al Sharpton at the National Action Network convention in New York that he would reserve a seat at Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem if he runs again. He has been conducting town halls in Republican-leaning states, including Oklahoma, as part of what observers read as an effort to demonstrate broad coalition-building potential.
His pitch that abolishing the Electoral College would force Democrats to campaign in Oklahoma is, in that context, an attempt to sell himself as a transformational figure who can compete everywhere. The fact that the argument’s central premise is factually wrong has somewhat undermined the presentation.
The town hall in Tulsa was held at Will Rogers High School and drew a capacity crowd in an area Buttigieg described as one that too many around the country have maybe written off as so conservative that only one viewpoint, only one party, ever wins. His willingness to show up in Republican-leaning territory is a genuine political virtue, and Republicans should acknowledge it even while mocking the Electoral College proposal.
But showing up in Republican territory to give an audience a factually incorrect popular vote argument is not the same as having a message that can actually win Republican-leaning voters back to the Democratic Party.
Buttigieg is facing significant structural challenges in his 2028 coalition building that go well beyond his Electoral College gaffe. A Yale Youth poll conducted in fall 2025 showed him garnering just 4 percent support among Black voters, compared to 47 percent for Kamala Harris among the same demographic. At the National Action Network event in New York, approximately one-third of the Black audience left after Harris finished speaking and before Buttigieg’s remarks began.
His struggles with Black voters, who form the foundation of any viable Democratic presidential coalition, represent a far more serious obstacle to his 2028 ambitions than the mockery produced by his Electoral College proposal.
The mockery itself, while politically significant, is worth putting in context. Buttigieg is not an unintelligent person. He has a demonstrated ability to communicate complex policy ideas in accessible language, and his willingness to campaign in hostile political territory reflects genuine political courage. The Electoral College gaffe was not a product of stupidity. It was a product of the bubble effect that affects all political figures who spend most of their time in ideologically homogeneous environments. In Democratic political circles, the argument that abolishing the Electoral College would have changed the 2016 outcome has been repeated so many times that it apparently no longer registers whether the same argument applies to 2024.
The internet corrected him instantly and mercilessly, as it does. The clip went viral on May 3, 2026, and had accumulated millions of views within hours. Every conservative commentator in the country posted some version of the same joke. Even people who generally have sympathy for Buttigieg’s political project had to acknowledge that proposing to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system in a speech given three weeks after it was confirmed that Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote in 2024 is the kind of unforced error that defines a political moment.
Donald Trump won 312 electoral votes. Donald Trump won approximately two million more popular votes than Kamala Harris. Under the Electoral College, Trump is president. Under Pete Buttigieg’s proposed popular vote system, Trump would also be president. The scoreboard, as Eric Daugherty noted on X, does not lie.
