Trump effort to make Electoral College even more anti-democratic fails for now
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Apparently a crucial legislator who recently switched to the Republican Party isn’t a full convert:
Donald Trump wanted Nebraska Republicans to change the state’s electoral vote rules — in a way that would likely flip one electoral vote from Kamala Harris to him.
But he may not have the votes to get it done — a key state senator confirmed Monday that he was still opposed to the rules change.
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, Joe Biden walked away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District, which includes the city of Omaha. Trump wants to switch this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote.
The stakes are enormous: the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District really could determine whether Trump or Harris wins in 2024.
If Harris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while Trump wins Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, and no other outcomes change from 2020, then Harris would need Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If she 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.
What’s critical to emphasize here is that what is not anti-democratic is switching to a winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes per se. What would be anti-democratic is doing it at the last minute to prevent the Democratic-controlled legislature in Maine from changing its allocation to winner-take-all to ensure Trump does not get a temporary, arbitrary advantage that could swing the presidential election:
But Trump’s allies suddenly revived the Nebraska rules change effort last week, and that timing may not have been a coincidence: It is now too late for Maine to change its rules, since bills take 90 days after they are passed to become law in the state.
The possibility of an Electoral College represents two other terrible parts of the process — permitting an even number of electors, and having House delegations rather than the House as a whole resolve elections when an Electoral College does not generate a majority. It is, as you would expect from a last-minute kludge meant to appease neo-monarchists and the slave power, an incredibly bad system.