Swing state guide: Nebraska's 2nd district
Trump is seeking a rule change to tip the balance of the whole election
Between now and election day, I’m going to be publishing swing state guides roughly once a week. The posts are designed to be digestible guides to understanding the political geography and demographics of each swing state, and I guarantee that they’ll make you the most informed person at your watch party on election night.
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The Electoral College has come to seem such a permanent and depressing feature of American politics that it can be difficult to remember that it is an institution whose operation has actually evolved throughout American history. There’s actually nothing in the constitution which says that states must use the winner-takes-all method of allocating Electoral College votes, even though nearly all of them do. One attempt to change this, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, has been adopted by nearly two dozen states, and would assign those states’ Electoral College votes to whoever won the popular vote. But it only comes into effect when enough states to make up an Electoral College majority sign onto it, which hasn’t happened yet.
Here in 2024, there are only two exceptions to the winner-takes-all rule: Nebraska and Maine.
In 1972, Maine started assigning its Electoral College votes based partly on congressional district. Whichever candidate does best in each of the state’s congressional district wins one vote, and whoever does best statewide wins an additional two votes. In 1992, Nebraska followed suit and implemented the same system. In practice, splits have almost never occurred - Maine is a very blue state, and Nebraska is a very red state. So, things proceeded pretty much as before, just under a slightly different rulebook.
But then the Trump effect - specifically urban-rural polarization - changed this. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump managed to wring an Electoral College vote out of a rural swathe of Maine - and in 2020, Biden flipped Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which contains the city of Omaha and nearby suburban areas, gaining a point for himself.
Nebraska could decide the whole election
These districts remain in play in this election - in fact, they could be vital to determining the winner.
One Electoral College vote might not seem particularly important, but it all depends on context. If Harris wins the Midwestern swing states and Trump sweeps the Sunbelt, then the result will be a 270-268 victory for Harris in the Electoral College - but only if she also keeps Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district. If she doesn’t, the election will result in a 269-269 tie - in which case the House of Representatives gets to decide the winner, and will almost definitely choose Trump.
This might sound absurd, but it’s actually a fairly plausible scenario. And it really highlights the importance of Harris retaining that single vote from Nebraska. There’s the Maine vote too, of course, but Harris winning that one is less likely. Urban-rural polarization seems to be a major and enduring feature of American politics right now, so winning urban Omaha is easier to imagine than winning back a rural part of Maine.
So the question is, how will Harris do it?
Nebraska’s second district
If you look at Nebraska’s second congressional district, then what you notice right away is that it’s an area of mixed densities. You have the urban core of Omaha, the suburban areas around it, and then rural and exurban areas beyond that. There are about 650,000 people living here, of whom nearly 490,000 are in Omaha proper.
Omaha and its suburbs is basically what this game is all about. It’s a fast growing city with a lot of highly-educated people and good jobs, making up over half of the GDP of the entire state. Because of its position on the Missouri river and in the middle of the country, Omaha emerged as a hub for river and railway transportation in the nineteenth century. Warehouses and a shipping industry meant the emergence of banking and insurance industries, and Omaha managed to move up the value chain as other parts of the West were left behind. Finance remains Omaha’s most important industry, making up about 20% of the city’s economy, and it’s led to high growth in recent years. The population hasn’t grown fast enough to flip all of Nebraska blue - this is still a really small state, and Omaha just isn’t that big - but it dominates the politics of the second district.
Still, the second district was reliably red until Trump came along. The only exception was in 2008, when Obama’s national landslide was strong enough to propel him to an extremely narrow victory there - something that Romney managed to comfortably overturn in 2012 despite losing the election nationally. In 2016, Trump carried the district by a much smaller margin than Romney had, and in 2020 he lost it by a large margin.
The story here is familiar. Trump is electoral kryptonite to high-educated city dwellers, including many independents. They were skeptical of him in 2016 and downright alarmed by him in 2020. Nebraska is a very white state, but Omaha is significantly less white, which again is positive for Democrats. And so Biden managed to achieve the best ever result for a Democrat in the Omaha region, netting one electoral vote.
But can Kamala Harris do the same? In a sense, this is the biggest question of the upcoming election, not necessarily because of the intrinsic importance of Nebraska’s second district, but because it is so demographically similar to other important parts of the country. A good result here probably means Harris is on track to perform well in the suburbs of Atlanta and Raleigh, which bodes well for her chances overall. If she slips here, she’s probably slipped fatally elsewhere too.
So far, polls for Harris in the second district have been pretty good. Biden was trailing Trump here - a real warning sign - but since Harris took over the race, she’s been polling 5 - 8% ahead of Trump, which is about the same as Biden’s margin of victory in 2020. Local Democrats say the vibes are good. The Harris campaign is also hoping that Vice President Tim Walz, a Nebraska native, will boost their appeal (although a cynic might add that if they believe in the theory of home-state advantage, maybe the campaign should have picked Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro as Harris’ running mate instead).
Stop the steal
There’s an additional wrinkle to all of this. Worried about providing Harris the crucial vote to put her over the top, Nebraska Republicans are trying to change the way the state allocates its Electoral College delegates. They want to return to the winner-takes-all method, denying Harris the chance of getting any votes out of Nebraska at all.
When this idea was floated earlier this year, it died because Republicans couldn’t get together enough support in the state legislature. But it’s now been revived, and it seems like there might have been some cynical gamesmanship to the timing. Earlier this year, Maine Democrats made clear that if Nebraska changed its rules, then Maine would do, essentially balancing the difference out by denying the GOP a delegate from rural Maine. But because of legal rules in Maine, any change would take 90 days to take effect, and it’s now too late to do it before the election. Nebraska Republicans appear to have waited until that deadline passed before reviving their own effort.
The new effort has some serious GOP firepower behind it. Lindsay Graham jetted in to try to win over wavering state senators, and the governor is considering calling a special session of the state legislature to make the change. Trump is also expected to soon start working the phones in support of the effort. What happens next will come down to some seriously complex state politicking which is hard for outsiders to discern, and all kinds of favors and deals are being promised behind closed doors. One key state senator is a former Democrat who wants to be the mayor of Omaha, and as of today he remains opposed to the effort. But things can change, and it’s never a good idea to bet against anyone in the GOP doing the thing that benefits Trump - that’s what the party’s rabid base demands, after all.
What to watch out for
That means that in the coming weeks before the election, there are a few things to watch out for:
What happens with rule changes. It might not seem likely that the election will come down to just this one electoral vote, but stranger things have happened. Chaos and controversy follows Trump everywhere he goes, and there would be no more chaotic or controversial election than one decided after a last-minute rule change like this. If Nebraska changes its allocation method, that’s bad for Harris.
Watch the polls out of Nebraska’s second district. It’s quite cool that we get polling of Omaha and its suburbs. It doesn’t just tell us what’s going on here but also gives us an insight into demographically similar parts of other swing states at a level of granularity that we don’t often get. If Harris is doing well in Omaha, it means she’s up with minorities, suburban moderates, and college-educated liberals - precisely the coalition she needs to win nationally.
Watch what the campaigns do. Trump is now playing defense in the district, making ad buys and putting resources into somewhere that he was previously more confident about. That’s a sign that his campaign is worried about tight election scenarios and his position in the Sunbelt. In fact, if either campaign seems to be putting an inordinate amount of resources into the district, that’s a sign they’re worrying.
On election night. Nebraska usually finishes counting its votes on election night, so you can watch for results in the second district to get some idea of national trends.