Trump and Nebraska governor push to deny Biden a crucial electoral vote

Donald Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen endorsed legislation that would take Omaha’s potentially decisive electoral vote out of play for Democrats, hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Tuesday X post suggesting it.

In just 200 words, Kirk urged Republicans to repeal the state’s 1991 law that assigned two electors to the winner of the state, and one for each of its three congressional districts. Republicans easily carried Nebraska in every subsequent election, but in 2008 and 2020, the Omaha-based 2nd District voted Democratic.

“Nebraskans should call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies,” wrote Kirk.

Five hours and 10 minutes later, Pillen put out a statement supporting a bill that would convert the state to a winner-take all system in November. Donald Trump weighed in early Tuesday evening, praising Pillen’s “very smart letter” in a Truth Social post.

The district has drawn special attention from election observers this year because of the unusually high chance of it playing tiebreaker in a close race between Trump and President Biden.

If Biden lost only Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada from his 2020 column, he would win the electoral college 270-268; if Nebraska gave all five electors to Trump, the tied 269-269 election would be decided by the incoming House’s state delegations, where Republicans currently hold an advantage.

Pillen’s statement drew some immediate murmurs of concern from Democrats, some of whom speculated that Maine’s Democratic government could respond by consolidating their own divided electoral votes, where Trump won the 2nd District in 2020. No other states award their electoral votes this way.

Democrats, who hold just one-third of the state Senate, were skeptical that Sen. Loren Lippencott’s bill would pass. The freshman Republican had introduced it fourteen months earlier, but it remained in committee, and his party had not included it in the priority legislation it needed to pass by April 18, when the session ends.

“The Nebraska Democratic Party is watching this bill closely and still believes we have the votes to stop the Republicans from removing a fair electoral system that represents voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb told Semafor. “The only reason Gov. Pillen sent a release today is, the extremist Charlie Kirk sent a tweet that, of course, our governor jumped up to respond to.”

Democrats sounded genuinely surprised at this scramble on Tuesday night, and confident that it wasn’t going to work. Lippencott, a freshman senator from Central City, was a conservative whose other legislation included an end to tenure at state universities; they weren’t expecting the bill to move. One senator sent me a short video of Lippencott on the Senate floor, saying “marijuana is the latest craze,” to demonstrate the kind of causes he took up, and others said that Republicans wouldn’t follow him.

“They may try a hail Mary, and try to amend [it] into another bill,” said Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh, who last year staged a weeks-long filibuster of a bill that restricted minors’ access to gender medicine. “But I would fight that. A vote for winner-take-all is a vote to diminish the voices of my constituents.”

Still: The founder of Turning Point USA jolted a doomed bill to life with a quick post and a receptive Republican audience. The Trump campaign has been perspicacious about election rules all year, winning Nevada’s caucus by default after state Republicans held a caucus with rules that disadvantaged Ron DeSantis. For years, Republicans in other states floated, then abandoned, changes that might help their nominee win electoral votes. A party that’s becoming much more responsive to conservative activists and commentators might act more decisively.

• If this 11th hour effort to change a state’s electoral system succeeds, it would join a number of ongoing efforts by the party to tweak rules before November. In Georgia, the Republican state legislature has passed a bill that would make it easier for voters to challenge registrations that they suspected of being fake; it would also automatically add any third party candidate who qualified for 20 other state ballots to Georgia’s ballot.