Lindsey Went up to Nebraska
He was looking for a vote to steal.
Here are the basics via Axios: Graham met Nebraska leaders in push to get Trump one more electoral vote.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) met with Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and around a dozen Republican state lawmakers Wednesday as Republicans seek a last-minute change to the way the Cornhusker state allocates its electoral votes, per multiple reports.
As likely any reader of this site knows, Nebraska (and Maine) do not use the unit rule (i.e., winner-take-all) to allocate their electoral votes. Instead, they allocate one electoral vote per congressional district and then two at-large in the state. As the screenshot above shows, that meant that in 2020 one of Nebraska’s EVs went to Biden and the rest to Trump. The urban area around Omaha voted Democratic, while the state as a whole voted for Trump. The only other time one of the EVs went against the state results was in 2008.
Nebraska is a pretty red state. Indeed, the last time the state voted Democratic for president was 1964. In 2020, it went 58.2% for Trump and 39.2% for Biden. I would note, however, that even with the one blue district going for Biden, the EVs were distributed 4 for Trump and 1 for Biden. That means that, with a vote share of just under 60%, Trump still won a disproportionate 80% of the EVs. The system is skewed, heavily, towards the state winner, with that distortion coming from the fact that states get 2 EVs based regardless of size.
If the electoral vote was based solely on districts with no at-large seats the result would have been 2 for Trump and 1 for Biden, or a ratio of 67% to 33%, which is pretty close to the 58.2% to 39.2% differential in the popular vote (exactly proportional distributions are hard to achieve with small denominators).
But all of that is just history, hypotheticals, and little arithmetic. What does this have to do with Graham?
Well, plainly put, what Graham and some of his co-partisans want to do is wall off the voters in the second districts so that they don’t count as they have since 1992. And the motivation to do so (and motivation and timing are rather important for assessing this story) because they fear those voters prefer Harris to Trump, so they want to take them off the board at the eleventh hour (or, at least, the tenth hour).
I would note that this maneuver also boldly underscores the inherent flaws of the Electoral College: that it clearly and plainly isolates voters from having a proportionate say in the election of the president (put another way, it short-circuits the notion of one voter, one vote). Graham and company are helping me illustrate what I often note as a fatal flaw in American democracy: how the lines are drawn are more important than voters.
The Electoral College makes some voters more important than others. That is inherently anti-democratic.
Graham here is not trying to find a way to make his preferred candidate/his party more attractive. Instead, he just wants to use last-minute legislative trickery to make sure that the voters who would have been heard are silenced.
I would note that this also underscores a concern I have voiced here many, many times: our electoral processes are not forcing Republicans to adapt to majority demands. Instead, they know that they can win with minority support and so do not have to adapt to a competitive environment. While I understand why Republicans would like that, I will again note that this is, in the long run, bad for everybody. It creates a poor-quality government and erodes the basic promises of democratic competition.
Please note that this strategic move is 100% about winning the Electoral College while almost certainly losing the popular vote.
I am not saying this is an illegal maneuver; it is not. The US Constitution clearly grants the states the right to determine how their electoral votes are distributed. They can legally do this. Being legal and being moral/just are often not the same thing.
Side note: I am not a general fan of the district method for allocating the electoral votes because of the simple fact that most districts in the US are uncompetitive, and if we allocated all the EVs that way, then the EC could be gerrymandered and suffer from all the maladies currently associated with House elections. I would prefer assigning electoral votes proportional to the state’s popular vote without regard to district boundaries, although we would still have distortions because of the 2-extra EVs per state rule. And, of course, those distortions are exacerbated by the fact that the US House is too small relative to the size of our population.
An addendum, because it bears repeating.
- We have had 6 presidential terms in the 21st century. 50% have been Republican and 50% have been Democratic. Yet only once (17% of the time) did a Republican win the popular vote. Once.
- The last time a Republican president won the popular vote was two decades ago: Bush in 2004 (and that was for re-election).
- The last time a Republican won the popular vote for a first term was 1988 (the first time I could vote in a presidential election). That was over 30 years ago!
- The last time a Republican won the popular vote when the opposition controlled the White House was Reagan in 1980.
The competitive environment is not forcing Republicans to adapt to the majority. This is one of the reasons that they are cleaving more fiercely to the fringes of their party.
The Electoral College is a democratic abomination that has never worked as intended or designed and that has been distorted over time by the nature of westward expansion. There is no representational alchemy involved in some deep balancing of national and state-level interests. Being a small state is not a special condition. Wyoming and Vermont have roughly the same population and one is very conservative and the other is very liberal.
The best argument for the Electoral College is that for most of its existence it served nothing more than a messenger function, conveying the will of the popular in a novel form (and yes, I have tried to find other good arguments–I am quite confident there are none). The currently clear deviation (2000, 2016, almost in 2012 and 2020, and maybe again in 2024) underscores a real problem, even if those benefitting from the problem don’t want to admit it.
While I am at it: even if the EC works as intended (again, it doesn’t), so what? In 1789, chattel slavery was legal, women could not vote, and we didn’t even have universal white male suffrage. As much as there are reason to admire the founding, the notion that we should be bound to design/intent is highly flawed.
Any thoughts on a strategy to get Republicans to go along with a change to the Electoral College considering that any changes wouldn’t be remotely in their interest? I believe, at least as a collective, that they would quite happily rule as a minority as poor-quality government and [erosion of] the basic promises of democratic competition are of little concern to them.
It seems that all reasonable Republicans interested in good conservative governance have left the party to the autocracy curious. Who can the Democrats negotiate with?
@Scott F.: Mostly we are at an impasse. I think that more attention to educating the public is necessary. At some point, the Democrats are going to have to press their own advantages, as I have argued before, such as adding states and expanding the House (which will require breaking the filibuster).
Maybe that creates the context for either simple hardball or for negotiations.
Pretending like all of this will self-correct is folly.
BTW, I learned this today from Heather Cox Richardson:
So, it’s been a 100 years since the EC was manipulated, but the EC isn’t unchanged since the Founding as defenders are apt to claim. And such a change to the EC doesn’t require amending the Constitution. But changing the EC will require a political force with power in the current structure acting in its long term interests. Because, the EC has never been about being moral/just. It’s been about power.
@Steven L. Taylor:
That fits with my thinking. If the voters can give the Democrats any semblance of a popular mandate (an EC victory for Harris and a drubbing in the popular vote would be sufficient I think) then the Democrats need to be strongly encouraged to pay some hardball and press their advantages as you say.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Well, Republicans have been playing hardball since at least the ’94 midterms. It’s long past time for the Democratic Party to step up. It’s not like they don’t know how: Tammany Hall, anyone? Like Wyatt Earp said in “Tombstone:” “I already got a guilty conscience; may as well have the money, too”
Conservative voters will never be in favor of going to a popular vote because they seem to think that New York and California have about a billion liberal voters who will decide the outcome of every election.
@Scott F.:
Jane Mayer in her 2016 book Dark Money laid out the history of how right wing money since 1980 made and executed a plan to implement minority rule. They worked hard and spent huge amounts of money to make this happen. I’ve seen an estimate of half a billion just to corrupt the courts and take over SCOTUS, largely to empower greater influence of money. Dr. Taylor notes:
This was the motivation for the REDMAP Project, a successful effort to gain GOP majorities in state legislatures so they could gerrymander to entrench those majorities. A success, and a bargain at 30 million 2010 dollars. It created the, so far hypothetical, possibility of a GOP legislature overturning a Dem popular vote in a state.
This business of the EC reversing the popular vote, of a non-functional House, of a Senate hobbled by the filibuster, of a corrupted Court, didn’t just fall out of the sky because of the nature of our political structures. A great deal of planning, effort, and money was put into exploiting any undemocratic flaw that could be found.
@gVOR10: REDMAP was a formalization of processes and plans that were already in place, starting in the early 90s (here’s a visual as to how long it can take to go into effect). I was working in Republican politics then, and there was a laser-focused effort on redistricting. It was viewed as the key to any kind of power or winning, and everything needed to be in place prior to the 2000 redistricting efforts.
I dont actually see much role for education about this process. Sure, it may help Dems more motivated to want to change but it helps to convince Republicans they should not change. AFAICT, correct me if I am wrong, it would take a constitutional amendment to really change this stuff and there is zero chance you get red states to agree.
Steve
Btw, if you’ve never been Omaha is a good town to visit. A quite vibrant downtown with a funky(ish) warehouse district.
There is no need to go up the hill unless you’re obligated to. It’s just standard middle America suburbia. I guess if you crave a certain chain restaurant.
I used to work with a guy that traveled 30-40 weeks a year. His go-to tactic was to eat at Outback Steakhouse at night whenever possible. It fit within his per diem, daily meal allowance. He always ordered the same thing. He didn’t need to think beyond getting there and back.
Went out with him one night in possibly Phoenix, Orlando, somewhere hot. I didn’t really care about my main, I just wanted the Bloomin’ Onion side. I attacked that sumbitch! Dick had never ordered the BO before so this was new to him. I shared, a little. A third. I was single, going to a club after, he was married, older going to the hotel to crash.
I inadvertantly kinda screwed up his life because he then had to order the Bloomin’ Onion every time after that.
When you are always on the road, away from home, you develop weird coping strategies. For a big portion of the 2000s I was in random cities on gigs for most of the year. 2 overseas gigs.
My coping mechanism was walking. You either got a hotel, long-stay hotel, or a pre-furnished corporate leased studio or one bedroom apartment. The best was when you didn’t need to get a car. Walk to and from. Walk around at night gawking at shit when you’re bored.
@Paine: In Multnomah County (Portland, OR), where I moved this past spring, 5.5 times more people voted for Biden than for Trump*. Even if (ETA: though?) Portland is an outlier, shifting the electoral weigh to popular vote weighting could very easily be catastrophic to Republicans as far as the Presidential race goes. House and Senate seats will still be mostly unchanged, but how long will individual Republican representatives last as the guys who stop the government from doing stuff? That’s bound to get old, eventually (or sooner).
I get current Republican objections. Perfectly.
*R–82995, D–367249
Has anyone crunched the numbers on how things would shake out if every state allocated by congressional district? I’m curious if that would change outcomes.
The EC is what keeps me from having to stomach presidential campaign ads because I live in a decidedly blue state. For that reason, I like the EC just fine. (Going to dinner in a bar in Wisconsin tonight – I think I will ignore the TVs.)
Brit ducks in
My word, but American electoral systems are weird.
Can ye not just tally up the votes?
(Yes, I know why not. But still.)
Ducks out
@Jen: I looked at that a while ago. I think that the tide shifted Red because of gerrymandering, but if the GOP doesn’t win the house, it’s close. At least that’s what I recall.
When Republicans complain that liberal states like California and New York will decide all of the presidential elections I point out a couple of things:
1) States are not deciding a damn thing. Voters – American people are.
2) You have the option to adopt more popular policies to attract more voters. Might want to think about doing that.
3) There are more Trump voters in California than in any other state. Why should their voices not be heard?
4) Why should presidential candidates be empowered to not care about the plight of Americans living in places like Texas and Indiana and South Dakota? Why should their concerns take a back seat to the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona?
5) Why should a voter in Wyoming have significantly more power than a voter in Texas? Are voters in Vermont smarter than voters in New York, therefore we must give them more say in how we run the country?
There is no legitimate rationale for maintaining the EC – and I’ve been arguing against it since high school in the late 1970s. My hope is that we can begin to make the argument that it injures everyone in America, not just Democrats. That’s the only way it ever goes away.
Really good post and analysis as usual. But the headline and subhead were pretty clever too. Love alluding to Lindsey Graham as the devil….
@Pete S: Thanks!
Well the devil certainly wouldn’t be looking to Graham for a soul to steal.