Donald Trump wished Nebraska Republicans to alter the state’s electoral vote guidelines — in a means that will seemingly flip one electoral vote from Biden to him.
But on Wednesday night time, the GOP-dominated Nebraska state legislature stated no. An effort to connect the proposal to a different invoice failed, with simply 8 votes in favor and 36 towards.
State Sen. Julie Slama (R), who supported the proposal, wrote on X afterward that the proposal was useless for this 12 months: “It won’t come up for a vote again.”
Nebraska at the moment has an uncommon means of distributing its 5 electoral votes. Rather 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 gained by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, Biden walked away with considered one of its electoral votes, as a result of he gained in Nebraska’s Second District, which incorporates town of Omaha. Trump needs to modify 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 may decide whether or not Trump or Biden wins in 2024.
If Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, whereas Trump wins Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, and no different outcomes change from 2020, then Biden would want Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If he doesn’t get it, the electoral vote could be a 269-269 tie. The new House of Representatives would break the tie with every state delegation getting one vote, and since Republicans will virtually absolutely management extra state delegations, which means a tie seemingly goes to Trump.
But after the failed vote Wednesday, Trump’s supporters had been now not optimistic that they may make this variation earlier than Nebraska’s legislative session ends this month.
Even if the rule change does by some means cross, Democrats have an apparent possibility 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 gained. Democrats may, in concept, change Maine’s guidelines and cancel out any benefit gained by Trump.
But past the angling for partisan benefit, it’s true that Nebraska’s and Maine’s guidelines are type of odd — quirky historic accidents that arguably needs to be introduced in keeping with the best way the opposite 48 states do it. The truthful approach 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.
Why oddball Nebraska and Maine break up their votes by congressional district
The historical past of the Electoral College 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.
In the nation’s earliest a long time, 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 means.
The district system may enable regional variations to be represented. But it watered down a state’s impression on the nationwide final result, as in comparison with the winner-take-all system the place all a state’s votes went to 1 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 modify 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 first was Maine, in 1969, which adopted a proposal from an idiosyncratic legislator, whose obvious motivation was to assist voters with completely different views be mirrored within the Electoral College 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 moderately than writing off all its electoral votes as safely Republican.
One may assume that proposals like this is able to transfer the Electoral College nearer to proportional illustration — however usually, 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 usually lean Democratic.
But Maine and Nebraska don’t appear to have had partisan motivations — and at first, there was no partisan impression, or certainly, any impression, as a result of the statewide winner saved additionally successful each congressional district in each states.
As urban-rural partisan polarization intensified, that began to alter. In 2008, Barack Obama gained Nebraska’s Second District. Republicans responded by making the district extra conservative in redistricting, however the underlying polarization developments continued and by 2020 Biden gained 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 gained NE-2 by 6.5 share factors, and Trump gained 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 once in a while, which is fairly odd — simply considered one of some ways the US’s technique of choosing a president is ridiculous.
What’s happening in Nebraska now
As partisanship and polarization have risen, Nebraska Republicans have tried to reply. Back in 2016, they tried to modify to a winner-take-all electoral vote system. But there was an issue — the filibuster.
Yes, the Cornhusker State is the uncommon state to have a legislative filibuster with a robust supermajority requirement. In truth, it’s stronger than the US Senate’s — a two-thirds vote, or 33 of 49 legislators, is important to beat a filibuster in Nebraska. And although Republicans have usually had huge majorities, it’s confirmed maddeningly tough for them to recover from that hump. They fell only one vote brief in 2016.
The newest push kicked off on Tuesday, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X a couple of nightmare state of affairs for Trump supporters the place Nebraska’s Second District may throw this 12 months’s election to Biden. He urged Nebraskans to “call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies.”
Just hours later, Gov. Pillen made his announcement that, “in response to a call out for his support,” he supported such a change, and Trump praised him in a Truth Social publish. (You may get the impression that this was not completely an natural grassroots phenomenon.)
But many doubted that they’d the votes. Republicans had 32 seats — one vote wanting the 33 seats essential to beat a filibuster.
The plot thickened on Wednesday when a Democratic state senator, Mike McDonnell, announced 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.
But when the proposal got here for a vote Wednesday night time, it wasn’t even shut — solely eight Republican legislators voted sure. Nebraska’s legislative session is scheduled to finish on April 18, so in concept there’s nonetheless time for one more try, however legislators stated that for procedural causes that’s fairly unlikely to occur.
If they by some means do handle to muscle the change by means of, Maine Democrats (who management the legislature and the governorship of their state) will face stress to reply in type. As they need to — if Biden loses his shot at a stray electoral vote, Trump ought to lose his too.
Update, April 4, 9:55 am ET: This article was initially revealed on April 3. It has been up to date to mirror the failed vote on the proposal in Nebraska’s legislature.
