The July 17 of the Weekly Standard has this article, attacking the National Popular Vote. The author is Tara Ross. Her title is, “How to Win the Presidency With 15% of the Vote.”
She assumes that if the National Popular Vote Plan were in force, there might be many strong general election contenders in November for president, so that the vote would be so split up that the first-place winner might have polled only 15% of the vote.
The states of the United States have, together, held thousands of gubernatorial elections. A check of gubernatorial election returns for all states, for the period 1824 to the present, shows that no one has ever won a gubernatorial general election with less than 30% of the vote. When people understand that there is not going to be a run-off, there is a strong tendency for most voters to deduce which candidates are strong enough to potentially win. Then, most voters choose to vote for one of those potential winners. Thus, even when ballot access is completely unhindered, the normal election produces a pattern in which only two candidates receive the lion’s share.
Three-way contests (for offices for which there is only one winner), in which any one of three candidates is perceived to be a potential winner, are not uncommon. But four-way contests, in which any one of four candidates is perceived to be a potential winner, in partisan general elections with no run-off of any type, are extremely rare, not only in the U.S. but in the world. The scenario of winners who only received 15% of the vote does not happen.