On Tuesday, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) urged his state’s legislature to change its rules for this year’s presidential election — a change that, if passed, would be very likely to flip one electoral vote from President Joe Biden to Donald Trump.
Nebraska currently has an unusual way of distributing its five electoral votes. Rather than giving them all to the statewide winner — as 48 other states do — it awards two votes to the statewide winner, and the rest go to the winner in each of Nebraska’s three congressional districts.
Nebraska is a deep red state that Trump won by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, Biden walked away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District, which includes the city of Omaha. Pillen and Trump want to switch this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote for Trump.
The stakes could be enormous: the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District really could determine whether Trump or Biden wins in 2024.
If Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while Trump wins Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, and no other outcomes change from 2020, then Biden would need Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If he doesn’t get it, the electoral vote would be a 269-269 tie. The new House of Representatives would break the tie with each state delegation getting one vote, and since Republicans will almost surely control more state delegations, that means a tie likely goes to Trump.
Importantly, though, it’s very unclear whether Nebraska Republicans have the votes to change this law. They would have to overcome a filibuster in the state legislature to do it, and Democrats in the state profess optimism that the GOP doesn’t have the votes.
And even if the rule change does pass, Democrats have an obvious option for a response: changing the rules in Maine. Maine is the only other state that splits its vote by congressional district, but there, the current rule benefits…
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