Nebraska could change its electoral system at the last second to help Trump win | Stephen Marche
AAmerican democracy is fragile. If you haven’t figured it out by now, you haven’t been paying attention. Dangers come from all sides. Donald Trump just survived his second assassination attempt. The governor of Ohio had to call in the state police to monitor a series of bomb threats against local schools after false rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in the area began circulating. And then there are the usual mass shootings, Proud Boy marches, and the rest. But at the heart of this brewing unrest, the most dangerous place in the entire country, the rock upon which the American state could collapse, is the quiet congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska, the very heart of the American heartland.
Omaha is a dangerous city, not in itself, but because of its utterly bizarre position in the Electoral College. In one of those strange quirks of American politics, Nebraska has a split vote in the Electoral College, and in recent elections Omaha has consistently voted Democratic. The other four congressional districts vote solidly Republican. Normally, this little hiccup in the system wouldn’t matter much. But 2024 represents a particularly precarious moment.
As it stands, once you eliminate the Democratic and Republican states, the most direct path to a Kamala Harris victory is through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. With those three states, she would gain exactly 270 seats in the Electoral College, the number she needs to win. In this case, she would win if, and only if, she held that single Electoral College vote in Omaha, Nebraska’s congressional district.
The Omaha electoral district has not mattered much because of a kind of bipartisan détente, a balance of power. Nebraska is not the only state that divides its electoral system into districts. Maine does, too. And Maine, while overwhelmingly Democratic, has an equally reliable Republican constituency that will almost certainly give Trump its seat in the Electoral College. If Nebraska changes its system to give Trump an advantage, Maine has said it will do the same to nullify any attempt to change the balance of power.
That’s largely why the push to change the law has been muted in Nebraska, even though Republicans control the state legislature. The fact that the Electoral College seat is contested also makes Nebraska slightly more worthy of attention from both national parties, meaning that the current division is, to some extent, in the best interests of all Nebraskans.
But that relaxed state may be about to unravel. The Maine legislature is now in regular session, and last Friday, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen made a public statement: “I strongly support unity and joining 48 other states by awarding our five Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins a majority of Nebraskans,” he said. “As I have also made clear, I am prepared to call the legislature into a special session to resolve this 30-year-old issue before the 2024 election. However, I must receive a clear and public indication that 33 senators are prepared to vote in such a session to reinstate winner-take-all.”
Pillen does indeed shift the issue of the Electoral College to state senators, but he also opens the door to the possibility of a change that could alter the course of the election.
Republicans wouldn’t even need to flip seats in the Electoral College to win. They would just have to muddy the waters. If, for example, the Nebraska legislature made sure that its electoral votes were in dispute, and the courts hadn’t decided the issue by January 6, and no one had reached the 270-vote threshold, that would automatically trigger a contingent election. In a contingent election, another arcane mechanism in the American electoral system, each state delegation, whether California or Wyoming, gets a single vote, meaning that Republicans would always win. (This possibility is the subject of a book I wrote with Andrew Yang, The Last Election.)
The sheer tedium of what I am describing here, the mundane technicalities of the complex legal structures in place, may at first seem less frightening than assassination attempts, bomb threats, cooked pets, and armed militias. But make no mistake: This is the real danger America faces. The complexity East The trap. Complexity makes it easy for people to believe that they have not been deceived, that a functioning democratic system, however bizarre, is still in place, even though it is clearly no longer there.
Needless to say, the nightmare I just described—and which could very well happen—is just one of many problems with the electoral system that could ruin the United States. (Georgia is a whole other nightmare.) Republicans have gone out of their way to maximize inconsistency precisely because they are aware of the system’s vulnerability.
Needless to say, the inconsistency of the results is the exact opposite of what the founders intended when they created the Electoral College 240 years ago. But they lived in a different world. The Electoral College was the product of an 18th-century agrarian society whose Capitol was 100 miles from the rainforest. At this point in history, it is little more than a crisis of legitimacy in progress.
The founders built their system to avoid exactly the kind of situation that the abolition of the Omaha, Nebraska, district would represent: the possibility of a democracy in bad faith and in name only.
