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The Trump campaign is making a last-ditch plea to Nebraska Republicans to change how their state awards electoral votes, switching to a winner-take-all system to deny Democrats a possible vote from the 2nd Congressional District.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham met with Republican senators in Lincoln on Wednesday, telling Semafor that Gov. Jim Pillen and Sen. Pete Ricketts invited him to talk about the campaign’s strategy. It’s a sign that Republicans are sweating every single electoral vote now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee.
Both Pillen and Ricketts, himself a former governor, have endorsed the idea of eliminating the state’s electoral vote split, which has been in place since 1992; in 2008 and 2020, the Democratic presidential nominee carried the Omaha-based 2nd district. The meeting was first reported by Nebraska’s 1011 Now.
“I hope they move forward, because it could come down to a single electoral vote,” Graham said after the meeting. “The Harris campaign wouldn’t spend 15 cents in Nebraska if it weren’t for this district. The entire federal delegation supports the change, because that one district is always going to be focused on the presidential politics.”
Nebraska Republicans have held the governor’s mansion and state legislature since 1999, and occasionally debated whether to return to winner-take-all. Earlier this year, before the regular legislative session ended, conservative activists led by Turning Point Action urged the party to act, and Trump himself endorsed the idea.
But Republicans didn’t get the 33 votes needed to advance it, and when Graham left the state, they were stuck at 30 or 31. Democrats were confident that the push would fall short.
“Republicans do not have the votes to change our fair electoral vote system, and this is all political theater they’re doing to keep Trump happy,” said Jane Kleeb, the chair of Nebraska’s Democratic Party.
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The campaign to end winner-take-all started with simple math. On the current national map, if Trump won three Sun Belt states he lost in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada — he’d need to flip one more state Biden won, plus Omaha to reach 270 electoral votes.
But if Nebraska awarded its five electors in one block, Trump would get 269 votes on that map, enough to throw the election to the House, where he’d be favored to win; each state gets a single vote in a “contingent election,” regardless of population, and Republicans control a majority of House delegations.
“They’re very worried about the election, as they should be,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday. “They can’t win legitimately so they always try to change the rules at the last minute. The good news is we’ve been prepared.”
Democrats have included the Omaha vote in their projections all year; Tim Walz, who was born just outside the district, went there last month for a packed rally. Polling taken around that time found the Harris-Walz ticket 8 points ahead there, an improvement from Biden’s 6-point win in 2020.
David and Burgess’s view
What’s frustrated conservatives all year about the Nebraska vote split is that the party isn’t using its majority to prevent a potential disaster — a one-vote electoral college defeat.
They have until the day before the election to change this system, and it’s too late for Maine Democrats to change their own electoral vote split to prevent its rural 2nd Congressional District from going to Trump. To implement that before Nov. 4, Maine Democrats would need a supermajority vote; Democrats control the legislature in Augusta, but they don’t have a supermajority.
Republicans may not have one in Nebraska, either. One of the votes they need would come from Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who switched parties this year, citing his anti-abortion views. And he’s seen as a likely candidate for Omaha mayor next year; voting with Trump on this could be politically toxic in a city that keeps moving to the left.
Still, ‘tis the season for political Calvinball. As you read this, some North Carolina Republicans are reportedly trying to convince Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to end his campaign for governor so the party can replace him, hours before the ballot deadline. They can only do that because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. folded his presidential campaign last month and sued to get off the state ballot; the conservative-led state supreme court let him do that after the deadline, forcing millions of ballots to be re-printed.
And Omaha’s only giving Republicans some indigestion because Democrats replaced Joe Biden on their presidential ticket, turning what looked like a march to defeat into a close race.
Notable
- While Nebraska looks to unite its electoral votes for a partisan advantage, other states have considered cracking theirs in the past. After President Obama’s 2012 victory, some national Republicans urged “Blue Wall” states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — with GOP-led governments to split up their electoral votes, assuming (wrongly, it turned out) that they had fallen out of reach.