The Trump Campaign’s Final Moments A push to manipulate the Electoral College by changing the way presidential elections are conducted in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District ran into a major setback Monday when a key swing voter, state Sen. Mike McDonnell, announced he would not support a winner-take-all system.
“In recent weeks, the conversation about how to apportion the Electoral College votes has come to the forefront again,” McDonnell, a Democrat-turned-Republican from Omaha, said in a statement Monday. “I respect that some of my colleagues want to have this discussion, and I have taken the time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of this issue. After careful consideration, it has become clear that now, with 43 days remaining until Election Day, is not the time to make this change.” He said state voters should consider amending the Constitution after the election if they want to change how electors are apportioned.
Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that split the way they distribute their Electoral College votes. Joe Biden won the state’s Omaha-based district in 2020, but in recent months Trump and his allies have waged an unprecedented pressure campaign to get the state to switch to a winner-take-all system. Trump has spoken to state senators in recent days, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Calif.) traveled to Nebraska last week to urge Republicans to hold a special session of Congress to change how the state allocates votes before November. The Trump campaign essentially ran the same anti-democratic playbook it used to subvert the 2020 election, but this time before the election.
That one electoral vote in Nebraska is crucial because if Kamala Harris wins the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would only have 269 electoral votes, one short of the majority needed to become president. If no candidate wins a majority, the election is decided by the House, where a majority of the state’s House delegations, not a majority of the House members, choose the winner. Republicans currently control a majority of the state delegations. I explained the dangers of this nightmare scenario last week.
In a contingent election, the majority of state delegations, rather than the entire House of Representatives, determines the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for the president, regardless of population. That means California, with a population of 39 million, would have the same level of representation as Wyoming, with a population of 584,000. This structure is heavily favored by Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states and who have drawn redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, allowing them to control the House delegation despite the close divisions in those states.
The provisional elections would amplify the structural inequalities inherent in the American political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have relatively little power relative to their share of the U.S. population,” a Protect Democracy report last year noted. “In provisional elections, this imbalance is enormous.” “The 28 smallest states control nearly 28 percent of the votes in the Electoral College (148), but they control 56 percent of the votes in provisional elections.” (The District of Columbia, which has three Electoral College votes but is not a state, was also barred from participating.)
This could lead to a very undemocratic outcome: a candidate could lose the popular vote and not win a majority in the Electoral College, but still become president thanks to a House of Representatives that does not represent a majority of the American people, much less a majority of the American people.
McDonnell has been at the center of this pressure campaign since he left the Democratic Party earlier this year to join the Republican Party. But he remains president of the Omaha Labor Coalition and aspires to become mayor next year. If he leads an effort to change the rules to hand the presidency to Trump, it would be damaging for him and the Democrats in purple Omaha.
Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Cleave praised McDonnell for “standing firm in the face of tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voices in our democracy.”
“Nebraska has a long and proud tradition of independence, and our election system reflects that by ensuring that election results truly represent the will of the people, without interference,” Kleeb said. Nebraska test tubeWe reported this news.
But despite these setbacks, Trump will continue to pressure Republicans to overturn Democratic norms if it benefits his candidacy. As seen in Georgia, where the Trump-supporting majority on the state election board adopted a series of last-minute rule changes that could give Republicans an excuse to refuse to certify the election if Harris wins the state.
