Inside the battle over Nebraska’s electoral college votes

Six months ago, Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood pitched Ronna McDaniel on a simple idea that could help the GOP win the presidency again.

Since 1991, Nebraska had split its electoral votes; two for the statewide winner, then three for the winner of each congressional district. Trump lost the Omaha-based 2nd district in 2020, and if the GOP lost it again in 2024 — even if it flipped Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia — it would lose the presidency by a single vote. There was a bill frozen in the state legislature that could change that, assigning all five electors to the statewide winner, if Republicans rescued it. Underwood’s question for the RNC chair and its legal counsel was: Would the national party help?

“In essence, the response was: I’m a federal officer, this is a state issue,” Underwood recalled this week. “Thanks for the heads up, tell us how it goes.” The idea went nowhere until late Tuesday morning. Underwood got a text from Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating office of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA and an RNC committeeman from Arizona, who was one of the loudest voices in the successful recent campaign to oust McDaniel. Bowyer asked if the Nebraska legislature was still in session, and whether the “winner-take-all” bill could still be revived. Underwood said that it could.

Within 36 hours, that plan was endorsed by Gov. Jim Pillen, Sen. Pete Ricketts, Donald Trump, and most of the GOP supermajority in the unicameral state senate. It was stymied on Wednesday night after one senator tried to add winner-take-all language to a bill heading to the floor. Her colleagues voted it down, with just eight Republicans in favor. Many of the no-votes were on record in favor of the core idea, but objected on strictly procedural grounds.

“Maybe y’all should do the work in the committee hearings when the bill is actually introduced,” snapped Sen. Julie Slama, the Republican who’d lost the vote.

Conservatives are still looking for a legislative end-run that could save the bill, however. Turning Point USA and the Nebraska GOP are planning an April 9 “Win Every Vote” rally to marshal support before the end of session, with TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk flying in to help. Underwood told Semafor on Friday that the party had multiple paths forward, if Republicans saw the potential importance of locking in a fifth electoral vote from Nebraska and stuck together.

“There are constitutional, by-the-rules ways of making this happen, including how to amend it into another bill, to call a special session, to do a suspension of the rules,” said Underwood. “They have options.”

Democrats and their allies were treading carefully. On Monday, Defending Democracy Together, a national group founded by anti-Trump Republicans, will begin an ad campaign urging senators not to change the electoral system.

“It’s an open question, but anybody opposing this effort to make Nebraska winner-take-all is in a good position right now,” said Gunner Ramer, the group’s national spokesman. “With Charlie Kirk coming in, with the rally happening next week, we want to put pressure on Republican lawmakers. We want to make sure the governor knows that they don’t have the votes.”

When the first attempt to pass winner-take-all failed this week, it might have looked like a last-minute ploy was done; the session would end on April 16, and Nebraska’s 2nd district would stay in play for November.

But it’s not really over, and the sudden momentum for the change is a study in the GOP’s shifting thinking about election rules. After the 2012 cycle, when Republicans had governing trifectas in multiple Obama-won states, some legislators made hasty and confused attempts to split their electors by congressional district. Then-RNC chairman Reince Priebus warmed to the idea. It had been decades since the party carried Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in presidential elections, so why not shake things up?

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue, that are fully controlled red, ought to be looking at,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The backlash was too intense for Republicans to deal with: None of the proposals passed. Then the Midwest “blue wall” fell, further taking air out of the idea.

Since 2020, when urban and suburban turnout swamped Republicans in swing states, the focus has further shifted. Most Republicans, according to polls, believe that Democrats stole those votes. The belief now is that an honest election on the current electoral map would go to Trump; the goal is to eliminate any quirks or rules that Democrats could use to their advantage.

That mindset drove the successful campaigns to bar private grants from funding elections, and a crop of new lawsuits that could remove voters who’ve skipped a few elections from the rolls. In Georgia, it has driven multiple election reforms, including one passed last week that would make it easier to challenge voters’ registrations and automatically add independent presidential candidates to the ballot if they qualify in 20 other states. (Democrats believe that the third party change would more likely hurt President Biden than hurt Trump, and the ACLU is planning plans to sue if Gov. Brian Kemp signs the bill).

What’s important here, and common to these efforts, is audacity. Republicans believe that Democrats are gaming elections with their own voting reforms; their nominee says, everywhere he goes, that they stole his last election. There might be a critical mass of Republicans in Nebraska who don’t want to change this rule close to the election. But a campaign like this, at the 11th hour, would have gone nowhere a decade ago. In a few days, Republicans will rally in Omaha to keep pushing it.

On Thursday’s episode of ThoughtCrime, another TPUSA podcast, Kirk and Bowyer explained how their “perfect storm” came together — a eureka moment about electoral math during show planning, then communications between party leaders who’d already been working together.

“After over six hours of calls and texts with countless people in Nebraska over the last 48 hours, here is the takeaway,” said Kirk, who arrived late to the show, wearing a University of Nebraska baseball cap. “If lawmakers want to get it done, it can be done. There is a very clear path to make Nebraska winner-take-all. If it doesn’t happen, it’s because there wasn’t enough will to win.”

To rev themselves up, the hosts played a song, created by AI, about the rightness and importance of winner-take-all in Nebraska.

Nebraska, rise above the fray
Let’s switch to winner-take-all and let democracy have its day
From Omaha to Lincoln, Kearney to Scottsbluff
Let’s make change for the better, it’s time to switch it up

“Can we get a rap version together that says that we’re going to eject Nebraska from the union if they don’t do this?” joked Bowyer.

“We’re kidding,” said Kirk. “We love Nebraska. I’m wearing the hat.”

• In the Lincoln Journal Star, Andrew Wegley reports from the Nebraska Senate about the failure of the first winner-take-all vote. “Democracy is on the line!” Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh said. “I want to throw up. And I want to go to bed. But I can’t because I don’t trust you.”
• In the Bangor Daily News, Billy Kobin talks with Maine legislators about why they’re unlikely to change their electoral vote-split system, the only one outside Nebraska. “To try to set the process up in a way to make people believe that other Americans are political ‘enemies’ by voting is a smack in the face,” said state Rep. Laura Supica, a Democrat who supports the system.