How Close Will This Election Be?
Trump’s gambit in Nebraska shows desire to capture even one electoral vote
How close will this presidential election be? Apparently close enough that Donald Trump is worrying about one electoral vote.
Nebraska and Maine are the only two states in the nation that do not award electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis to the plurality winner of the state’s election. Maine and Nebraska each award one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two to the overall state winner.
Nebraska is a solidly Republican state, but the congressional district centered in Omaha voted for Joe Biden in 2020, splitting the state’s votes 4 for the Republicans and 1 for the Democrats.
Donald Trump does not want to lose that vote again.
He cares enough that his supporters have pushed a bill in the Nebraska legislature to return to winner-take-all, the procedure they used before the 1970s.
When the bill faced opposition in the legislature, because it was proposed too late to meet procedural requirements, Trump called State Senator Tom Brewer, chair of the committee considering the legislation, to “urge” him to find a way around the rule.
According to the Nebraska Examiner, Brewer was not to be moved, stating that it was too late to vote the bill out of committee. Trump, the report says, retorted that Brewer’s political career was over.
Apart from the crassness of yet another perversion of democratic principles and the bullying threats, why does Trump care so much about one electoral vote?
President Biden won the 2020 presidential election with 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 needed to win. Remember how close the results were in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? If Trump had carried either Michigan or Georgia and Arizona, the electoral vote count would have been tied at 270. Other hypotheticals changing a few votes in close states would have led to the same result.
And what happens if the electoral vote count is tied (or if a third party candidate were to win enough votes to deny either candidate a majority)? The election goes to the House of Representatives in an election among the top three finishers (or two, if only two win electoral votes). In this case, each state gets one vote and 26 votes are needed to win. One does not know what the House elected in 2024 will look like when it is seated in January 2025 (and it is the newly elected House that votes), but the Republicans have controlled a majority of state delegations in recent Congresses, even when they have been in the minority.
Trump is currently leading in all of the states that are likely to be closely connected—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina (which he won in 2020), Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Michigan and Pennsylvania each lost an electoral vote after the 2020 census, losing a seat each in the House because of declining population. These states among them now have 87 electoral votes, about 20% of the total. But they will see the vast majority of candidate time, surrogate time, and advertising dollars.
Analystss predict that the polls will change frequently between now and November, but it is easy to come up with combinations of states for Biden and those for Trump among this group that would lead Biden to have either 270 or 271 electoral votes.
And thus the lone Democratic electoral vote in Nebraska CD2, centered in Omaha, would become crucial. That is not lost on Trump. (So too might the Republican vote in the Second Congressional District of Maine. It is noteworthy that neither the President, nor the Democratic majority in Maine’s legislature, is seeking the change Maine’s law, despite the fact that it undoubtedly would benefit their chances.)
This presidential election is likely to be very close, in terms of both popular votes and electoral votes. Recent polls show that President Biden has evened up the national popular vote and is gaining in six of the seven battleground states.
Trump’s futile effort to change the rules in Nebraska is one more piece of evidence that the two campaigns are gearing for a battle for every electoral vote. The Biden campaign knows this as well as the Trump campaign does—just look where he is campaigning and into which states investments of federal dollars are flowing.
Who wins the 2024 presidential election will come down to a few votes to six or seven states. The choice of candidate may be clear to most who follow politics—but the outcome of the election is far from certain.