A movement to undermine the Electoral College, which has largely lied dormant for several years, may be gaining steam after Hillary Clinton’s win in the popular vote while losing the election to Donald Trump in the Electoral College.

The outcome marks the second time in the past five elections for the White House that the winner of the popular vote (Al Gore in 2000) has lost the Electoral College tally.

The National Popular Vote plan would make the raw national vote totals the determining factor in choosing the presidency, without seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.

The way it would work is that states that reach a presidential election majority, 270 electoral votes, would sign a compact pledging that their electors will vote for whichever candidate wins the popular vote. That would be the promise made, by law, regardless of the election outcome within each of these particular states. The constitution allows states full autonomy in the method of choosing their electors.

Skeptics should note that the effort, which began more than a decade ago, has already secured the backing of 10 states and the District of Columbia, totaling 165 electoral votes. The plan has been introduced in 50 state legislatures and, in addition to the states in support, the plan has passed in one legislative chamber in 12 more states that add up to 96 electoral votes.

The partial success in those states, if completed, would put the National Popular Vote compact at 261 electoral votes, just nine short of making it a reality.

10 states on board so far

The states so far that have passed the measure are only traditionally Democratic-leaning states and none is a battleground: California, Illinois, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state.

Since it became clear that Clinton had won the popular vote by about 400,000 votes, or a margin of 0.3 percent, disappointed Clinton supporters are chatting about eliminating the Electoral College on social media and petitions are circulating online in support of getting rid of it.

But pursuing a constitutional amendment, which is required to dump the Electoral College, is a rather foolish approach. The researchers at Five Thirty Eight report that 700 constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress to change or eliminate the Electoral College over the past 200 years and none have come close to passing. The complaints about the winner-take-all approach for each state began shortly after the republic was created.

The reason why the National Popular Vote movement is so, well, popular in big states like California and New York is because those are noncompetitive, solidly Blue States that receive nearly no attention from the presidential candidates.

On Monday, N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation reaffirming his state’s support for the proposed agreement. Officials on hand pointed out that candidates concentrate more than two-thirds of their advertising budget and two-thirds of their campaign stops in just five states. Almost 100 percent of their message is seen in approximately 16 battleground states. New York has 19.5 million people, but it’s routinely ignored by campaigns.

Just three states got majority of candidates’ attention

The concentration on just a few battleground states, prompted by the growing partisan polarization in the electorate, gained focus in the 2016 campaign season. Most of the country stood by as mere spectators throughout the heated contest.

Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine, after the Democratic convention in July, held almost 60 percent of their campaign events in just three states — Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. If Ohio is added as a fourth destination, the myopic approach reached three-quarters of all Democratic events in just four states.

Looking at it from another vantage point, the Clinton-Kaine ticket only held three post-convention campaign events outside of the 11 states that were marked as battlegrounds based on the 2012 election.

Trump followed a more unconventional path to the presidency, varying his travel schedule more so than the Dems. But Trump’s list of winning states – many of them in the rural regions of the Plains and the Mountain West — raises another key argument against the Electoral College and in favor of a direct election.

Because we have a state-by-state process in which small states enjoy a disproportionate share of clout, it is less than truly democratic. For example, the rural state of Wyoming, which has a population below the other 49 states and D.C. — and even dozens of metropolitan areas — receives the minimum three electoral votes, based on its two U.S. senators and one House member.

So, Wyoming receives one electoral vote for every 192,000 people. Texas, for example, receives one electoral vote for every 685,000 people. As people in California point out, a vote in Wyoming for president is essentially worth four times as much as a vote by a Californian.

National agenda becomes urban agenda?

However, experts say the downside to a presidential election based on the popular vote is that the candidates, rather than spending all their time in a few key states, would spend most of their time in the nation’s largest cities and suburbs. The national agenda could be tilted toward a decidedly urban flavor.

That potential ideological overhaul could manifest a typically 21st Century dogfight, with Republicans engaging in an all-out effort to destroy the compact. Election results in 2012 and again in 2016 show the GOP as the party of rural voters — in the least populous sections of the country and in the Upper Midwest. Yet, a pre-election survey by the Rasmussen polling firm, which leans right, found that 58 percent of Republican voters approved, either enthusiastically or with some reservations, the elimination of the Electoral College.

At the same time, under a system based on the popular vote, minorities could be brushed aside in an election where the Electoral College is moot. Currently, courting the Hispanic vote is a key means of winning a big, important state like Florida. But the Hispanic vote takes on far less importance in a national vote where they represent just 17 percent of the total.

Before 2000, only twice before, since the beginning of the two-party system, has the winner of the popular vote lost the presidency — and the other two occurred in the 19th century. Gore’s popular vote win 16 years ago was thoroughly overshadowed by the ensuing five weeks of recount battles in Florida.

The hundreds of anti-Electoral College proposals that have emerged in the past failed because it is so difficult to amend the constitution. A proposed amendment must be approved by two-thirds of both the House and Senate and then ratified by at least 38 out of 50 states. The closest Congress has come to amending it since 1804 was in 1969 when the House passed a resolution that proposed the direct election of a president and vice president, but it failed in the Senate.

The futility of the amendment route remains a key selling point for the National Popular Vote project.

“I feel very bullish about the popular vote proposal,” said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, which supports the plan, in a recent interview. “I think that there’s every reason to expect that it will pass if not by 2020, by 2024. I think it actually has a real shot for 2020.”