Trump’s latest push to subvert democracy hits a major roadblock.

by Ari Berman

The Trump campaign’s eleventh-hour push to rig the Electoral College by changing how Nebraska’s Second Congressional district awards its presidential vote hit a major roadblock on Monday when the key swing vote, state Sen. Mike McDonnell, announced he would not support a winner-take-all system.

“In recent weeks, a conversation around whether to change how we allocate our Electoral College votes has returned to the forefront,” McDonnell, a Democrat turned Republican from Omaha, said in a statement on Monday. “I respect the desire of some of my colleagues to have this discussion, and I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.” He said the state’s voters should instead consider a constitutional amendment after the election if they want to change how Electoral College are distributed.

Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that splits how they award their Electoral College votes. Joe Biden carried the state’s Omaha-based district in 2020, but in recent months Trump and his allies undertook an unprecedented pressure campaign to get the state to shift to a winner-take-all system. Trump spoke with state senators recently and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) traveled to Nebraska last week to urge Republicans to hold a special session of the legislature to change how it allocates its votes before November. The Trump campaign was essentially running the anti-democratic playbook it used to subvert the 2020 election, but this time doing so before the election.

That one Electoral College vote in Nebraska looms large because if Kamala Harris wins the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania she will only have 269 electoral votes, one shy of the majority needed to become president. If no candidate gets a majority, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of state House delegations, not a majority of House members, would select the winner. Republicans currently control a majority of state delegations. I explained the danger of this nightmare scenario last week:

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

McDonnell was at the center of this pressure campaign because he left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican caucus earlier this year. But he remained president of the Omaha Federation of Labor and has aspirations of becoming the city’s mayor next year. If he helped lead the effort to change the rules to deliver the presidency to Trump, that would hurt him with Democrats in purple Omaha.

Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, praised McDonnell for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy.”

“Nebraska has a long and proud tradition of independence, and our electoral system reflects that by ensuring that the outcome of our elections truly represents the will of the people without interference,” Kleeb told the Nebraska Examiner, which broke the news.

However, despite this setback, Trump will continue to exert pressure on Republicans to upend democratic norms when it benefits his candidacy. Just look at Georgia, where the pro-Trump majority on the state election board has adopted a series of last-minute rule changes that could give Republicans a pretext to refuse to certify the election if Harris wins the state.