In Nebraska on Tuesday, two dozen state senators met with Gov. Jim Pillen as part of what may be the cycle’s most unlikely scheme to save Donald Trump. The plot drew in Trump’s most sycophantic sycophant, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and is part of a national effort to steal away just one potential electoral vote from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Unlike most states, Nebraska doesn’t award all its electoral votes to the candidate who takes the most votes in the state. Instead, it awards two votes to the state’s popular-vote winner and then one to the winner of each of its three congressional districts. Nebraska has been that way since 1991, when a Nebraska state senator heard about the idea, thought it sounded fairer than the winner-take-all approach, and was “jazzed” enough to draft legislation that narrowly passed the Nebraska legislature.
Now Republicans are trying to change those rules at the last minute in hopes that this will snatch victory from Harris and restore Trump to the White House.
The idea that the election might swing a single electoral vote is based on a particular line of reasoning: What if Kamala Harris doesn’t win any southern or western swing state that Joe Biden picked up in 2020 (Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada), while North Carolina stays in the red column and Harris makes a sweep of the northern industrial states?
Democrats have twice (2008 and 2020) picked up the “blue dot” of Nebraska’s 2nd District that covers Omaha and surrounding portions of two counties. But both of those elections would have been solid Democratic victories even without the rogue Nebraska electoral vote.
Still, the idea of the blue dot making a difference is plausible.
All that adds to 270, enough to put Harris on the inaugural stage … but only if she also secures that little blue dot.
Democrats feel pretty optimistic that the Omaha dot will be blue once again. Republicans are afraid they’re right. So while the “Blue Wall and Nothing Else” scenario may be unlikely, they don’t want to take the chance. Which is why Graham was there to share Trump’s wishes with Pillen and the state senators on Wednesday.
They want that dot.
The effort to snatch away Omaha’s vote was bolstered earlier in the year when a state senator made his own flip from Democrat to Republican and announced that he would support a winner-take-all solution … or promised to oppose it. It depends on whom he spoke to last. But the pressure is definitely on from Washington, with the Republican members of Nebraska’s U.S. House delegation sending a letter to state legislators urging them to squash the dot.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen
How could Democrats respond to this?
The state senator who brought this idea to Nebraska back in 1991 got the idea from another state that had already split the vote: Maine. And in April, Maine House Majority Leader Maureen Terry promised that if Nebraska returned to winner-take-all, the Pine Tree State would follow suit.
“If Nebraska’s Republican governor and Republican-controlled Legislature were to change their electoral system this late in the cycle in order to unfairly award Donald Trump an additional electoral vote, I think the Maine Legislature would be compelled to act,” Terry wrote in a statement to the Nebraska Examiner at the time.
However, NBC News reported on Thursday night that Maine Democrats have likely passed the cutoff to make such a change. Maine requires a 90-day delay for legislation to go into effect, and “Thursday marked 89 days until the Electoral College is scheduled to meet on Dec. 17,” according to NBC News. The one way to bypass the 90-day cutoff is with a supermajority vote in the state legislature, for which Democrats almost certainly do not have the votes.
In other words, if Nebraska Republicans’ ploy works and they change their system to winner-take-all, they will likely secure an additional electoral vote for Trump. NBC News notes that this would matter if Harris wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but no other swing states. That scenario would result in a 269-269 Electoral College split, meaning that each state’s House delegation would vote to elect the president, and Republicans hold a clear advantage there.
Still, it’s unlikely an election comes down to one electoral vote. But if this cycle has taught us anything so far, it’s that unpredictable things sometimes happen.
Keep this one on your radar.
Correction: A previous version of this story and headline misrepresented how the actions of Nebraska Republicans could affect the outcome of the election overall. Based on new reporting, the story has been updated to clarify that Maine is largely past its cutoff to change its system to winner-take-all and therefore offset Nebraska Republicans’ potential actions.
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