Read: The Electoral College was meant to stop men like Trump from being president

Bayh saw direct popular vote as “a kind of logical outcome to the continuing expanding of the franchise in the U.S.,” a natural extension of the then-newborn Voting Rights Act, says Jay Berman, a legislative aide to the senator from 1965 to 1972, when he became his chief of staff. (Bayh, who is 90, was not available for comment.) It was a piece of the great project of empowering the average citizen, which Bayh would further soon after with the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age, and which he would attempt to expand again when he authored the Equal Rights Amendment.

The measure was bipartisan. Three Republican senators were key supporters, and President Richard Nixon was open to the idea. Reform was broadly popular across party lines prior to 2016, when Trump’s election sent Republican support for a direct popular election from its 2012 level of 54 percent to 19 percent, according to a Gallup survey. (Democratic support surged from 69 to 81 percent in the same poll.) But in 1969, when the proposal was introduced, opposition was just as bipartisan, with the brunt of it coming from a set of southern senators including Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond. Most were ardent segregationists.

The measure’s supporters pushed hard. Out of at least 700 attempts in Congress to alter the presidential-election system, the 1969 proposal came closest to making an actual constitutional change. Bayh argued against the potential for candidates such as George Wallace—the Alabama governor, who garnered 46 electoral votes as a third-party candidate in 1968—to swing the election. Bayh’s proposal called for a minimum of 40 percent of the vote to achieve victory. If no candidate reached that threshold, a runoff election would be held between the two highest vote-getters.

Bayh summarized his views by alluding to a hypothetical grade-school “homeroom captain” election, saying in a 1979 hearing of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, “Everybody that votes for Suzie gets their vote counted for Suzie, and everybody that votes for Johnny gets their vote counted for Johnny. The fact that Johnny gets less votes than Suzie, that is why Suzie wins. And that is not the case under the Electoral College system.”

But the Electoral College amendment couldn’t break out of Congress. It got 339 votes in the House, well above the required two-thirds, but two cloture votes failed in the Senate, garnering first 54 and then 53 votes. That doomed the amendment, and with it the yet-unthought-of presidencies of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. “Poor Birch Bayh spent his life trying to get it done; it couldn’t even get two-thirds in the Senate,” says Bill Josephson, a retired partner at the law firm Fried Frank who has written extensively on legal issues surrounding Electoral College abolition.