What we can learn from one blue dot

Debates over the electoral college are never-ending and (so far) purely abstract. Except in Nebraska.

Jamie Kelter Davis/POLITICO

Every presidential election since 1992 has consisted of 56 separate winner-take-all races. While all 50 states and the District of Columbia tally every ballot from within their respective borders, it is Maine and Nebraska alone that choose to give their statewide winners just two electoral votes instead of all of them.

Add to these 51 races five more: Maine’s 1st and 2nd congressional districts, and Nebraska 1, 2, and 3. The winning candidate in each of those five races receives one electoral vote.

These 56 simultaneous presidential elections may constitute the 21st century’s flashiest demonstration of federalism in action.¹ We do it this way because the states, including and especially Maine and Nebraska, choose to do it this way. Or, more precisely, the 50 states and DC once chose to do it this way once and have continued the practice ever since.

Maine started awarding electoral votes by congressional district in 1969, and Nebraska followed suit in 1991. These two experiments have in fact yielded results indistinguishable from those of a winner-take-all statewide contest 81 percent of the time. Even in Maine and Nebraska, the statewide winner has pocketed all of the electoral votes in 17 of 21 races.

Then again 2020 marked the first year in which both states split their votes. Joe Biden picked up a win in Nebraska 2 (as did Barack Obama in 2008) and Donald Trump did so in Maine 2 (as he had previously in 2016). With many of those Biden votes coming from Omaha four years ago, Nebraska 2 has earned a reputation as a “blue dot” in a sea of red.

Of course Maine 2 is a red dot in its own right. What’s unusual about Nebraska in particular is that its chosen method for conducting presidential elections has been contested continually for 33 years. Surely no state since the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 has witnessed as much legislative debate over electoral vote allocation schemes as Nebraska has over the past three decades. This same method is uncontroversial if not celebrated in Maine, a blue state where even the ranking House Republican trumpets allocation by district as “the gold standard of election processes in the United States.” But in red Nebraska this process is very much a live issue.

Conventional wisdom says it’s difficult to change the rules of the electoral college. Nebraska is the exception that proves the truism. The state’s rules were changed in 1991, and Republicans have found it extraordinarily difficult to change them back ever since. Bills to return the state to a winner-take-all system passed Nebraska’s unicameral legislature twice in the 1990s only to be vetoed each time by then-governor Ben Nelson.

This year Trump and Lindsay Graham headed up the push for winner-take-all only to encounter an inversion of the familiar Capitol Hill script. Nebraska is one of just 14 state legislatures nationally to make provision for filibusters. Trump’s supporters lacked the 33 votes needed to end debate and bring the bill to a vote. Democrats and Republicans traded their usual roles as the status quo was preserved in the face of a clear legislative majority favoring change. If not for the filibuster, winner-take-all likely would have returned long ago to Nebraska’s statute books.

Representation and attention
Maine’s contentment notwithstanding, so-called “district” elections would constitute a problematic gold standard if adopted nationwide. The five congressional maps covering the Pine Tree State and Nebraska happen to be relatively unobjectionable for electoral college purposes. Such is not the case everywhere. Now imagine the aftermath of the next census, with eager partisans redrawing maps from coast to coast knowing these boundaries will bear directly on who reaches the White House.

Conversely, state lines are pretty well established. (We haven’t seen a robust interstate boundary dispute since 1998.) Even in a polarized era, one subject where Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else can typically reach consensus is existing state lines. The optimal number of simultaneous winner-take-all races for the presidency can be variously envisioned as anything from one to the present 56 to somewhere beyond 56. But given how congressional districts are typically created, having 486 such races may be a stretch.

In the two states where the district method is used, it’s touted by adherents as providing greater representation. Certainly this was the case four years ago with respect to Omaha Democrats and Maine Republicans outside coastal redoubts like Portland and Bar Harbor. But voters in Saunders County, Nebraska, can attest that “greater representation” doesn’t blend seamlessly with even a scaled-down version of winner-take-all. Trump carried Saunders with 71 percent of the vote in 2020, but the sparsely populated county shares Nebraska 2 with Omaha. Biden prevailed comfortably with 52 percent support district-wide.

Where district elections really shine is in the sheer attention they can generate when the stars align. Lately those stars have aligned in greater Omaha. If Nebraska were a winner-take-all state, it would receive no more notice in an election year than neighbors like South Dakota or Colorado.

Instead, Omaha and its surrounding area rank as a true presidential swing vote. Nebraska 2 is one of just seven congressional districts nationwide rated “EVEN” by the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Of course, even an intriguing voting scheme can’t lend Omaha the same prominence as true swing-state metropolises like Philadelphia or Atlanta. Nevertheless, the city’s receiving a good deal more attention than it otherwise would — or than it soon will if winner-take-all does return.

Could other solid-red or -blue states mimic Nebraska’s success in grabbing just a tiny bit of the spotlight? Perhaps. If, say, Kansas ever has any interest in giving it a shot, the state’s 3rd congressional district (Cook PVI R+1) might just become another Nebraska 2. Who knows.

Reforms of despair
Each state is free to structure its presidential elections “in such manner” as it pleases. Since the time of Andrew Jackson the most common response by far to this freedom has been to throw all of your state’s electoral might behind the winning candidate.

The fact that Maine made a different choice in 1969 speaks to a very different time when the electoral college itself appeared to be in peril. George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968 badly frightened a bipartisan congressional bloc. Five months after Maine enacted its district plan for electors, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment for a national popular vote. That measure never even come to a vote in the Senate, but Maine’s law remained. The governor said he wanted his state to help develop “a wise national judgment on our future course in the election of a president and vice president.” Maine lawmakers assumed other states would soon follow their example.

There would indeed be attempts to do so, but typically such ventures weren’t forays in experimentation as much as they were reforms of despair. Maine notwithstanding, the most common source of alternate allocation schemes for electoral votes has been states where one party’s presidential candidates keep losing both nationally and locally. After George H.W. Bush’s resounding victory in 1988, for example, Democrats unsuccessfully pushed for district allocations in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas. (One bill did pass the North Carolina house before the state Democratic chair disowned it as “defeatist.”) This was the era when Nebraska’s nominally non-partisan legislature passed its law on district elections.

A quarter-century later it was Republicans’ turn to despair. The GOP lost twice to Obama, and in early 2013 district schemes were all the talk in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, The chair of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, said district elections were “something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at.”

We don’t often see reforms of despair anymore. Both parties approach each election believing they very well might win. We are therefore likely to continue with a minimum of 48 states using winner-take-all for the foreseeable future. The example of Nebraska these past few years, however, has illustrated how we may have more say in the framers’ electoral design than we think we do.

1. Flashiest but not necessarily most significant. The Senate of course affords each state equal representation. Unlike the allegedly “impossible to amend” electoral college, however, the upper chamber’s apportionment is literally impossible to amend. Article V states: “[N]o State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”