Opinion | The GOP’s Nebraska plan to beat Kamala Harris just hit a wall

Former President Donald Trump is no stranger to trying to strong-arm his fellow Republicans into changing the rules to benefit him. Nebraska has become the focal point of his latest attempt to game the system ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Looking to prevent a case where Vice President Kamala Harris ekes out a win because of the state’s quirky way of divvying up its electoral votes, Republicans loyal to Trump are running a last-second effort to snatch that victory out of reach.

Forty-eight states assign their electoral votes via a winner-takes-all system, doling them all out to whoever wins the popular vote statewide. But Nebraska’s hybrid system has two of the state’s five electoral votes go to the popular vote winner, while the remaining three are awarded to the winner of each congressional district. (The only other state to use a similar hybrid model is Maine.)

The GOP’s push is attempting to prevent what at first glance appears to be an unlikely scenario: Harris winning the “blue wall” swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and Trump winning back Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, three states he won in 2016 but lost in 2020. In such a scenario, Harris could win 270 Electoral College votes and the presidency with the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which President Joe Biden won in 2020.

But if Nebraska gets rid of its way of appropriating Electoral College votes, then the two campaigns would have a 269-269 tie. The Electoral College hasn’t been tied since the election of 1824. Per the Constitution, the House of Representatives then chooses the president, and the Senate chooses the vice president. The House would then vote by delegation in a “contingent election,” with Republicans likely controlling a majority of seats in enough states to give the win to Trump.

Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, have been calling on state lawmakers to switch to a winner-takes-all system since at least April. The Legislature didn’t make the swap during its regular session, but the state’s congressional delegation thinks Pillen should call an emergency session to force through the change.

If Republicans in Nebraska did change the state’s law, it would happen too late for Democrats in Maine to act as a counterbalance to such obvious shenanigans. As NBC News reported last week, it “takes 90 days for legislation to go into effect in Maine after it is enacted, and Thursday marked 89 days until the Electoral College is scheduled to meet on Dec. 17, meaning it’s already too late for the Maine Legislature to change to a winner-take-all system under normal rules.” Immediate “emergency” legislation would require a supermajority that Democrats lack, leaving their split system — which is likely to award one of the state’s four electoral votes to Trump — on the books.

Trump himself reportedly called on at least one state senator in Nebraska to press the issue, according to The Washington Post, but we still may not see this latest pressure campaign bear fruit. State Sen. Loren Lippincot, a Republican who led the effort to change to winner-takes-all system last year, told the Omaha World-Herald last week that “the proposal remains two or three votes shy of overcoming a filibuster to pass, just as it was at the end of this year’s legislative session.” And on Monday, one of those GOP “no” votes made perfectly clear that he wasn’t going to be swayed to back any last-minute change to the current system.

Despite the wheels seemingly coming off, the campaign to alter the rules in Nebraska puts three things on display. First, we have before us yet another example of the GOP’s ongoing projection issues. In messaging that’s endorsed by the Republican Party, Trump is constantly lying about his political adversaries unfairly attacking him, claiming that his plans to strike out against them if he’s elected again are counterpunches. Likewise, Trump and Republicans made it a point to accuse Democrats in blue states of cheating in 2020 by making it easier for voters of all political persuasions to cast absentee ballots during a global pandemic. And, yet, these same Republicans talk about this naked attempt to weigh the dice in Trump’s favor in Nebraska as if it’s only fair.

Second, the demand to change Nebraska’s rules also shows how attempts to reform the Electoral College can backfire. Maine switched away from a winner-take-all system in 1969, and Nebraska did so in 1991. As of 2008, neither had had an election in which the electoral votes were split between candidates. Since then, it’s happened twice in both states: in Maine in 2016 and 2020, and in Nebraska in 2008 and 2020. Both states made changes that seem eminently reasonable at first glance — but it’s not the fix that many would have assumed at the time.

In theory, splitting up a state’s electoral votes may be more democratic and encourage candidates to compete in states that might otherwise be deemed safe for one and unwinnable for the other.  In Omaha, the biggest city in the “blue dot” of Nebraska, Harris and Trump are spending resources they probably wouldn’t if Nebraska were still a winner-take-all state. But in a world where gerrymandering exists, what is intended to be a pro-democratic reform has the potential to be used anti-democratically instead if it became more widespread, watering down the will of the voters instead of enhancing it.

And, finally, the fact that we have to even consider any of this is patently ridiculous. The Electoral College is an elitist, antidemocratic mess that’s resulted in almost all this century’s presidential elections coming down to a handful of voters in a handful of states. Forget tinkering around the edges. We need to get rid of the Electoral College system completely. This outdated relic leaves the U.S. open to the kind of shenanigans that Trump and his allies are trying to pull in Nebraska when what we need is a system that lets candidates focus on winning the most votes nationwide.