Donald Trump needed Nebraska Republicans to alter the state’s electoral vote guidelines — in a method that may possible flip one electoral vote from Kamala Harris to him.
However he could not have the votes to get it accomplished — a key state senator confirmed Monday that he was nonetheless against the foundations change.
Nebraska at the moment has an uncommon method of distributing its 5 electoral votes. Somewhat than giving all of them to the statewide winner — as 48 different states do — it awards two votes to the statewide winner, and the remainder go to the winner in every of Nebraska’s three congressional districts.
Nebraska is a deep purple state that Trump received by a 19-point margin in 2020. Nonetheless, Joe Biden walked away with one in all its electoral votes, as a result of he received in Nebraska’s Second District, which incorporates the town of Omaha. Trump needs to change this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote.
The stakes are huge: the only electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District actually might decide whether or not Trump or Harris wins in 2024.
If Harris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, whereas Trump wins Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, and no different outcomes change from 2020, then Harris would want Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If she doesn’t get it, the electoral vote can be a 269-269 tie. The brand new Home of Representatives would break the tie with every state delegation getting one vote, and since Republicans will virtually certainly management extra state delegations, meaning a tie possible goes to Trump.
An earlier Trump push to alter Nebraska’s guidelines did not get the votes again in April. And if it had succeeded, Democrats had an apparent choice for a response: altering the foundations in Maine. Maine is the one different state that splits its vote by congressional district, however there, the present rule advantages Trump — it delivered him one elector in a state Biden received. Democrats might, in concept, have modified Maine’s guidelines and cancel out any benefit gained by Trump.
However Trump’s allies all of a sudden revived the Nebraska guidelines change effort final week, and that timing could not have been a coincidence: It’s now too late for Maine to alter its guidelines, since payments take 90 days after they’re handed to develop into legislation within the state.
Democrats cried foul throughout the nation, characterizing this as a unclean trick — an try and steal the 2024 election. However on Monday, state Sen. Mike McDonnell — who switched from the Democratic to the Republican social gathering earlier this 12 months — stated he was nonetheless against the change. And if he holds agency, Republicans received’t have the votes.
Why oddball Nebraska and Maine break up their votes by congressional district
Past the angling for partisan benefit, it’s true that Nebraska’s and Maine’s guidelines are form of odd — quirky historic accidents that arguably ought to be introduced according to the best way the opposite 48 states do it. The honest method to do it might be for each to alter their guidelines in the identical cycle, standardizing the winner-take-all rule with out handing both candidate a bonus.
The historical past of the Electoral School system is a weird one, however the fashionable norm of the way it works is: every state holds a statewide vote, and the highest candidate in that vote would get all of that state’s electors. That’s the winner-take-all system.
Within the nation’s earliest many years, there was extra selection. Some states didn’t give voters a direct say in any respect, letting state legislators merely decide electors. Others did maintain a statewide vote, however counted the leads to separate districts of the state, awarding electors that method.
The district system might permit regional variations to be represented. Nevertheless it watered down a state’s affect on the nationwide consequence, as in comparison with the winner-take-all system the place all a state’s votes went to at least one candidate. And as partisan competitors intensified, states flocked to winner-take-all — the district system was gone by the 1830s, and stayed gone for greater than a century.
Then, within the latter half of the twentieth century, it got here again. Two states determined to change to a system the place two electoral votes would go to the statewide winner, and one electoral vote to the winner in every congressional district.
The primary was Maine, in 1969, which adopted a proposal from an idiosyncratic legislator, whose obvious motivation was to assist voters with totally different views be mirrored within the Electoral School outcomes. (Maine had used the district system again within the 1820s.) The second was Nebraska, in 1991, the place legislators hoped to get presidential candidates to pay extra consideration to the state slightly than writing off all its electoral votes as safely Republican.
One may assume that proposals like this is able to transfer the Electoral School nearer to proportional illustration — however typically, these proposals are simply partisan soiled methods. Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have batted across the thought, believing gerrymandered congressional maps would assure them greater than half the electors in swing states that extra typically lean Democratic.
However Maine and Nebraska don’t appear to have had partisan motivations — and at first, there was no partisan affect, or certainly, any affect, as a result of the statewide winner stored additionally profitable each congressional district in each states.
As urban-rural partisan polarization intensified, that began to alter. In 2008, Barack Obama received Nebraska’s Second District. Republicans responded by making the district extra conservative in redistricting, however the underlying polarization tendencies continued and by 2020 Biden received it once more. In Maine, the agricultural Second District swung to Trump in each 2016 and 2020. (Neither district was all that shut in 2020 — Biden received NE-2 by 6.5 proportion factors, and Trump received ME-2 by 7.5.)
So we’ve ended up with a system the place 48 states use winner-take-all, after which two states throw a stray electoral vote to somebody on occasion, which is fairly odd — simply one in all some ways the US’s technique of selecting a president is ridiculous.
What’s occurring in Nebraska now
As partisanship and polarization have risen, Nebraska Republicans have tried to reply. Again in 2016, they tried to change to a winner-take-all electoral vote system. However there was an issue — the filibuster.
Sure, the Cornhusker State is the uncommon state to have a legislative filibuster with a robust supermajority requirement. In reality, it’s stronger than the US Senate’s — a two-thirds vote, or 33 of 49 legislators, is critical to beat a filibuster in Nebraska. And although Republicans have repeatedly had huge majorities, it’s confirmed maddeningly tough for them to recover from that hump. They fell only one vote quick in 2016.
This 12 months’s preliminary push kicked off in April, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X a few nightmare state of affairs for Trump supporters the place Nebraska’s Second District might throw this 12 months’s election to then-candidate Biden. He urged Nebraskans to “name their legislators and their governor to demand their state cease pointlessly giving energy to their political enemies.”
Simply hours later, Gov. Jim Pillen made his announcement that, “in response to a name out for his help,” he supported such a change, and Trump praised him in a Reality Social publish. However many doubted that they’d the votes. Republicans had 32 seats — one vote in need of the 33 seats essential to beat a filibuster.
The plot thickened when a Democratic state senator, McDonnell, introduced he was switching events to the GOP — seemingly offering the mandatory vote. Then the plot, er, thinned when McDonnell advised Politico’s Elena Schneider that he would nonetheless help filibustering the electoral vote change. And when the proposal got here to a vote, it wasn’t even shut.
However final week, Republicans tried once more. Gov. Pillen known as in state senators and urged them to make the change, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) traveled to the state with the identical ask. Initially, some experiences indicated McDonnell was wavering.
On Monday, although, McDonnell issued a press release saying he was nonetheless in opposition to it: “After deep consideration, it’s clear to me that proper now, 43 days from Election Day, is just not the second to make this modification,” he stated.
Replace, September 23, 4:45 pm ET: This text was initially revealed on April 3 and has been up to date to replicate the brand new GOP effort to alter Nebraska’s guidelines.