The D.C. Council voted yesterday to move forward on a bill that lends the District’s support to a movement seeking to elect the President via the popular vote. The real question is whether the movement has any real traction: D.C. is only the seventh jurisdiction to approve such legislation, joining Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington and our neighbors to the north, Maryland. Notice anything about those six states and the District? Anyone whose studied their recent electoral history will: none of those states have gone for the Republican candidate in any Presidential election since 1988, when three of them went for George H. W. Bush in his romp over Michael Dukakis. The roots of the popular vote movement are firmly rooted in logic — yes, electing the person who wins the most votes makes some sense, and sure, it could be nice to have Presidential candidates engaged with us instead of simply banking or writing off our three electoral votes — but we’d wager that it might struggle to gain its footing until, you know, a state who actually votes for Republicans more than every twenty years or so approves it.