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.
