But what was going on was obvious enough, especially after 1968, when the Electoral College had nearly allowed an unrepentant racist to hijack the presidential election. “You didn’t need a mastermind to say, ‘Hey, what’s behind this?’” Mr. Berman said. “It was there. It was the elephant in the room.”
Throughout 1970, as Mr. Bayh struggled to bring the amendment to a vote, the threat of a filibuster lurked. He tried to fight fire with fire, threatening his own filibuster of Mr. Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. The nomination eventually failed, but Mr. Bayh had lost precious time.
The Southerners managed to delay the amendment with various tactics throughout the summer. By September, those tactics had been exhausted, and the filibuster began.
Mr. Bayh needed 67 votes to end the filibuster, known as invoking cloture. (A few years later, the Senate dropped the threshold for cloture to 60.) As September wore on, he was having trouble getting out of the mid-50s.
This double-supermajority hurdle infuriated Mr. Bayh and his staff. “We already needed a two-thirds vote!” Mr. Berman said, referring to the requirement for all constitutional amendments. “This was like, in football, a 15-yard penalty for piling on.” Only there was no penalty.
Still, Mr. Bayh was confident that if the amendment could get a full floor vote, it would pass. The dispute over the Electoral College wasn’t partisan, as it is today. “The paramount issue,” said Senator Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, “is the fundamental right of every citizen to cast a vote that has no more weight nor no less weight than that of any other citizen.”
On Sept. 29, 1970, the Senate voted on whether to end the filibuster and move forward with the amendment. The amendment’s supporters fell five votes short. No effort to switch to a national popular vote has come anywhere near as close since.