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. But not only is this extremely unlikely to make a difference in the overall race, it would set off a waiting trap that would cost Trump at least as much as he gained.
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 not totally impossible.
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 extremely 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.
However, not only is it extremely unlikely the election comes down to one electoral vote, but also all the efforts to change Nebraska’s system are probably pointless in the first place.
That’s because 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 if Nebraska decides to slip their system back to winner-take-all, Maine House Majority Leader Maureen Terry has promised that the Pine Tree State has promised to 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,” Terry wrote in a statement to the Nebraska Examiner, “I think the Maine Legislature would be compelled to act.”
This matters because Maine has a reliable little red dot—a single rural Maine electoral vote, which Trump picked up in 2016 and 2020.
Flipping Maine to winner-take-all would be more certain to take a point away from Trump than changing Nebraska would be to take a point from Harris. The latest Maine polling shows Trump leading Harris 49% to 42% in Maine’s 2nd District, but Harris with a 50% to 41% advantage statewide.
That Republicans are working so hard to push change in Nebraska is a real sign of Trump’s desperation. But it’s not a real threat to Harris’ election.
