IN NEARLY every political race in a democracy, the rules are simple: the candidate who gets the most votes wins. The American presidency is a notable exception: four times in the past 200 years the loser of the popular vote has taken the oath of office. For three of those four cases, blame the Electoral College.

This unloved and Byzantine body emerged during America’s founding as a compromise between those who wished for direct popular election of a president and those who preferred the president to be elected by Congress. Hundreds of constitutional amendments have been floated to end or amend the Electoral College; yet it remains. Although the constitution mandates the existence of the Electoral College, states are free to decide how to apportion their electoral votes. In every state but two, the winner of the statewide popular vote gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, each give two electoral votes to the popular-vote winner, and apportion the rest to the popular-vote winner in each congressional district. That can produce splits. In 2008 John McCain won four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes by winning the popular vote and two congressional districts, but Barack Obama’s strong performance in Omaha, the state’s biggest city, let him peel off one elector. Those systems have survived numerous attempts to change them. Between 2006 and 2011 eight states and the District of Columbia enacted, and every state legislature in the country considered, bills that would pledge all their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, but only when states with a majority of the country’s 538 electoral votes have done the same (the electoral votes pledged currently total just 132). Once triggered, this provision, formally known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would guarantee that the popular-vote winner would always win the presidency. In the year after the 2000 election, which Al Gore lost to George W. Bush despite receiving over 500,000 more votes, 29 states proposed vote-allocation changes. Most want to move from the winner-take-all system that 48 states (plus the District of Columbia) use to the district system used by Nebraska and Maine.

A similar fondness for the district system has emerged in the wake of the 2012 election. But whereas the 2000 proposals arose in states with both Democratic and Republican governors and legislators, and seemed driven by the sense that the Electoral College had thwarted the popular will, the most recent wave of proposals begins and ends with Republicans.

In early January Bill Carrico, a Republican state senator from Virginia, introduced a bill to apportion his state’s electoral votes as Nebraska and Maine do, but with the two additional electors going to whichever candidate wins most districts, a cunning scheme that would have seen Mitt Romney win eight of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes, instead of none.

In the past month officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all states that Mr Obama won which happen to have Republican governors—have flirted with similar proposals. Reince Priebus, who heads the Republican National Committee, said that electoral-vote reapportionment was something that “states that have been consistently blue [ie, Democratic] that are fully controlled red [ie, Republican] ought to be looking at”. In 2012, if all the 50 states had apportioned their electoral votes as Nebraska and Maine did, Mr Romney would have beaten Mr Obama by 276 to 262 despite having lost the popular vote by nearly four points.

As it turns out, Mr Carrico’s bill died in committee, and officials in other states now seem to be slowly backing away. The problem with the Republican proposal is not really the gamesmanship. Both sides play electoral games: consider, for instance, the relative number of visits from candidates received by swinging little New Hampshire and blue California. The problem for the party is that it continues a defensive, backward-looking and ultimately losing strategy of the last election, in which Republicans tried to keep non-white voters from voting rather than engaging with them. Instead of trying to thwart the popular vote, Republicans might be a lot better off trying to win it.