Nearly every state allocates its electoral votes in the same straightforward way: The presidential ticket that wins the most votes gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The Electoral College can be complex, but this part of the process is simple: 48 states use a winner-take-all model.
There are two exceptions — Nebraska and Maine — that rely on a hybrid system. In the Cornhusker State, for example, which has five electoral votes, the candidate who wins Nebraska’s popular vote automatically gets two votes, while the other three go to the candidate who wins the popular vote in each of the state’s three congressional districts. Maine has four electoral votes, and it operates the same way.
In theory, with 46 days remaining in the 2024 election cycle, and early voting already underway in some areas, both states are locked into this same model in this year’s presidential race. In practice, quite a few Republicans apparently disagree. The New York Times reported:
Former President Donald J. Trump’s allies are resurrecting efforts to change how Nebraska awards its five electoral votes, a hybrid system that could deliver a single but decisive vote to Vice President Kamala Harris from a reliable red state in one tiebreaking scenario. With less than seven weeks until the election, all five Republicans who represent the state in Congress are pushing for Nebraska to return to a winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes that had been used before 1992 and was based on the statewide popular vote.
Yes, with roughly six weeks to go, Republicans are worried that the Democratic ticket might be able to win Nebraska’s Omaha-area district — an area where vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is from — fair and square. With this in mind, these same Republicans believe there’s still time to change the rules of the game, pass a new law, overhaul the state’s system, and make it effectively impossible for Harris to win this one electoral vote.
In other words, GOP officials are eyeing what is effectively an electoral-vote heist in the campaign’s final weeks.
Up until fairly recently, Nebraska Republicans had an incentive not to bother: Maine Democrats said they’d retaliate in kind. This would, for all intents and purposes, negate the effort.
But as NBC News reported, under state law in Maine, it’s now too late for Democrats to change the state’s system to a winner-take-all model. Nebraska Republicans can therefore proceed, knowing that their scheme would not force a retaliatory move, at least not before Election Day 2024.
Did Nebraska Republicans deliberately wait until now to consider such a gambit, knowing that it’d be too late for Maine Democrats to respond with manipulation of their own? We’ll probably never know for sure, but the question has hardly gone unasked.
As for congressional Republicans’ interest in developments in Nebraska, Sen. Lindsey Graham missed some votes on Capitol Hill this week because he was in — you guessed it — Nebraska, meeting with local GOP policymakers. To be sure, the South Carolinian denied that he was in the Cornhusker State lobbying on the Trump campaign’s behalf, telling NBC News that he was invited to speak to Nebraska Republicans about foreign policy. That might be true, though it’s worth noting for context that (a) Nebraska is a landlocked state, over 1,000 miles from the nearest international border; and (b) Graham has a rather controversial record when it comes to alleged election interference, which has an effect on his credibility. I won’t pretend to know what will happen next, but those thinking, “It’s just one vote” should think again. As a Semafor report explained, “The campaign to end winner-take-all started with simple math. On the current national map, if Trump won three Sun Belt states he lost in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada — he’d need to flip one more state Biden won, plus Omaha to reach 270 electoral votes. But if Nebraska awarded its five electors in one block, Trump would get 269 votes on that map, enough to throw the election to the House, where he’d be favored to win.” Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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