Former President Donald Trump is making a renewed effort to secure one of Nebraska’s electoral votes that could decide who wins November’s presidential election.
According to reports in the Nebraska Examiner and other sources, Republican candidates are in talks with Nebraska lawmakers in a second attempt to pass a bill through the state’s one-chambered Legislature that would change the state’s electoral vote allocation system and deny Vice President Kamala Harris a chance to win one of the state’s five electoral votes.
If the ploy is successful, it could change the electoral map and require Harris to win additional states to win the presidency.
A purple dot in a sea of red
Nebraska and Maine are the only states that don’t use a winner-take-all system for awarding electoral votes. In Nebraska, two of the state’s five electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes statewide. The remaining three votes are awarded to the winner of each of the state’s three electoral districts.
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While Nebraska is a reliably Republican-leaning state, the 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses Omaha, has sometimes been won by Democrats in recent presidential elections, including for former President Barack Obama in 2008 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
That one electoral vote could be the key to Harris getting the 270 votes she needs to win. If Harris wins the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she can secure a majority in the Electoral College with just Nebraska’s vote. She doesn’t need to win any of the Sun Belt battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada or North Carolina.
Current polls show Harris tied or leading in “blue wall” states, but trailing in some Sun Belt battleground states.
Some Nebraska Republicans have tried to change the system that divides electoral votes among state districts since it was approved by the state Legislature in 1991, but bills have been vetoed by the Democratic governor or died in committee.
Nebraska’s system drew national attention in April when national conservatives, including President Trump, urged Republican Governor Jim Pillen to pass a bill in the General Assembly that would restore the winner-of-the-state system. Despite the Republican majority and Governor Pillen’s support, the bill did not receive the 33 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. But Governor Pillen and other state Republicans are considering calling a special session to pass the bill if they could.
“I and other conservatives have been working diligently to gauge the Legislature’s support for Winner Take All during the special session before the election,” Pillen said in a statement last week.
“At this time, we have not yet received any concrete, public indication that the 33 senators will vote for the WTA,” Pillen said. “If the situation changes, we will be proactive in calling a special session.”
According to the Washington Post, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina visited the Nebraska governor’s mansion on Wednesday for a private meeting in an attempt to persuade several Republican state senators to support winner-take-all electoral votes.
“I want to change the law. I have no qualms about that,” Graham, an ardent Trump supporter, told The Post.
One key Nebraska lawmaker is Sen. Mike McDonnell of Omaha, who switched parties from Democrat to Republican at the end of this year’s legislative session after coming under fire from state Democrats for his support of an anti-abortion rights bill. Though he’s now a member of the state Legislature’s Republican majority, he has remained steadfast in his stance that he will not vote for winner-take-all legislation, a stance he reiterated this week.
Maine is now gone
The current Republican effort to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state is different from the last because Maine no longer has the opportunity to make the same changes that could negate the effect of Nebraska awarding additional electoral votes to Trump.
When the fight over Nebraska’s election system flared up again in April, Maine House Majority Leader Maureen Terry, a Democrat, said that if Nebraska moved to change its system, Maine would do the same and strip one of its electoral votes that went to Trump in 2020. Currently, Maine does not have the authority to change its electoral vote system; a bill would take 90 days to go into effect after being passed by the Maine Legislature, too late for the electors to meet on December 17.