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Nebraska is not a state that gets a lot of political attention.
From its first presidential election in 1868, it’s been a reliably Republican state, except when there’s something really unusual going on. This year, though, Nebraska — or at least a part of it — could wind up being a swing state.
That’s because Nebraska is one of just two states — Maine is the other — that doesn’t award its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Instead, both states award them one by one by congressional district, with the final two going to the statewide winner.
In 2008 and 2020, that meant this otherwise predictably Republican state awarded one of its electoral votes to a Democrat — first Barack Obama, then Joe Biden — because they carried the congressional district around Omaha.
Depending on how other states break in a close election, it’s theoretically possible that the deciding electoral vote this year could come from that one Nebraska congressional district.
Donald Trump and other Republicans have tried to head that off by trying to get Nebraska to change its system back to winner-take-all, which would all but guarantee him an “extra” electoral vote. For a time, Maine — a Democratic state where Trump won one congressional district and thus one electoral vote in 2016 and 2020 — threatened to change its system to balance things out. Last week, Republicans in Nebraska abandoned their effort because they couldn’t find the votes in the legislature to make the change; some thought it was unseemly to change the rules so close to the election.
This is a subject that’s come up in Virginia before. In 2013, then-state Sen. Bill Carrico, R-Grayson County, introduced a bill in the General Assembly to award the state’s electoral votes by congressional district. It died on an 11-4 vote in committee.
Had that bill passed, the immediate impact would have been to carve some electoral votes for Republicans out of a state that’s gone Democratic in the past four presidential cycles. In 2020, that would have meant instead of Biden getting all 13 electoral votes in Virginia, the result would have been Biden 9, Trump 4 — because Trump carried the 1st, 5th, 6th and 9th congressional districts. That wouldn’t have changed the national results. What, though, if every state awarded its electoral votes by congressional districts?
Every four years, there’s always a conversation about how the Electoral College works and why we don’t just elect presidents the same way we do everybody else — you know, whoever gets the most votes?
For the record, that’s not going to happen. That would require changing the U.S. Constitution, and the votes to do that simply aren’t there. Next question?
By contrast, any state has the power right now to change how it awards electoral votes. Maine did this in 1969. Nebraska did it in 1992. Virginia or any other state could do this whenever the votes in its legislature were there. I haven’t seen any political interest in that, on either side, anywhere. However, it’s worth looking at the implications of such a move because they are quite significant. Adopting an electoral vote-by-congressional district system would dramatically change the nature of presidential campaigns — and, when we go back and retroactively apply this system, we see it would often change who wins.
Let’s deal with each of these in turn.
Virginia would get more presidential attention, but it would be focused on just a few congressional districts
We’ll start with Virginia, then broaden out.
If presidential campaigns think Virginia is in play, here’s what they do: Democrats try to run up the vote in Northern Virginia and urban areas such as Richmond, Norfolk, Roanoke, etc. Republicans try to maximize rural turnout, as Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been trying to do with a recent swing through the 5th Congressional District and JD Vance did with a post-convention visit to Radford.
If Virginia chose its electors by congressional district, the importance of both those strongly Democratic districts in Northern Virginia and those strongly Republican districts in rural ones would matter a lot less. They’d still matter some, for purposes of the statewide electoral votes, but instead of helping to win 13 votes, they’d only help win two.
Instead, both parties would have to focus less on turning out their respective bases and more on swing congressional districts. In 2020, that would have been, in order, the 2nd District in Hampton Roads (which Biden won 50.1% to 48.2%), the 7th District between Richmond and Northern Virginia (which Biden won 52.6% to 45.8%) and the 5th District in Southside (which Trump won 53.4% to 45.2%).
The congressional districts have been redrawn since then. Both the 2nd and 5th have become more Republican, the 5th especially so. However, when we look at this year’s congressional contests, the 2nd and 7th are considered competitive for House races so presumably would be for a presidential race, too. That’s where both presidential campaigns would focus because they’d see the potential for winning three electoral votes: the single electoral vote from that congressional district, and then two statewide. On a return-on-investment basis, both parties would have better ROI sending their candidates and surrogates to, say, Fredericksburg and Virginia Beach rather than Northern Virginia (for Democrats) and Southwest Virginia (for Republicans). That would shift the focus to two swing suburban districts.
Now imagine how these changes would play out on a national scale.
The dynamics of presidential campaigns would be changed dramatically
Right now, presidential campaigns focus on about a half-dozen swing states; campaigns put almost all their energies into those states. The rest really don’t matter. There’s no reason for a Republican presidential candidate to campaign in California or a Democrat to campaign in Alabama; there’s no way they’ll carry either of those states. For that matter, there’s no reason for a Democrat to campaign in California or a Republican to campaign in Alabama; they start with those states in their pockets. Instead, they essentially camp out in those half-dozen swing states.
If electors were decided by congressional districts, candidates would be forced by political necessity to campaign in more states, but smaller slices of them.
In 2020, congressional seats in 13 states flipped parties. Those would certainly be swing districts that might draw visits by presidential candidates. Let’s also look at where they were: California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Of those 13, only three (Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina) are in states that are generally regarded as swing states. Maybe four if you want to count Florida. That means an election based around congressional districts might have prompted the Democrat to campaign in South Carolina and Utah and the Republican to campaign in California and New York.
There were 14 congressional districts in 2020 that voted Biden for president but Republican for U.S. House member. (If the election had been rigged, you’d think the riggers would have arranged for a bigger Democratic majority.) That’s where the election would have been most intense, so those districts would have drawn presidential-level attention, too. Those districts were in Arizona, California, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. We see more swing states represented here, but we still see some in states that otherwise tilt strongly one way or another.
Most of these are suburban districts, so more states would be “in play” but fewer parts of existing states “in play.” Example: Candidates would pay more attention to Virginia, but they’d be focused on the 2nd and 7th districts, less so elsewhere. Republicans would be going to California, Democrats to Ohio, but only targeting the swing congressional districts because they know the rest of the state is out of reach.
Overall, it seems this system would have several impacts — and probably others we don’t realize yet.
For one, the value of urban and rural voters would be diminished, while the suburban voters in these congressional districts would gain more influence.
Which system is more fair?
That depends on how you define “fair.” Choosing electors by congressional districts would engage more states but perhaps fewer voters. A 2015 study by the nonprofit FairVote.org (which some consider a liberal group) found that fewer people live in the congressional districts that are considered “at play” than live in the states considered “at play.”
Electing by congressional districts would have changed some presidential outcomes, and would have resulted in more elections where the popular vote winner wouldn’t have won the electoral vote. 2000 would have been a clear electoral vote win for George W. Bush instead of a disputed win based on Florida’s “hanging chads.” Mitt Romney would have won in 2012, even though Barack Obama took 51% of the popular vote. Donald Trump would have still won the 2016 presidential election even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
Popular vote losers who win nationally aren’t unusual in some countries
Like I said, the chances of the U.S. abandoning the Electoral College are zero. Over the history of the republic, though, we’ve become accustomed to the popular vote winner winning the election — although we’ve now seen elections in 2000 and 2016 where that didn’t happen (plus one or two in the 19th century, depending on how you count 1876). However, that’s not unusual in parliamentary systems.
In Canada, the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau has won three terms in a row as prime minister — although in two of those three federal elections, his party polled fewer votes than the opposition Conservative Party. It just won those votes in the “right” places to win more seats in Parliament, while the Conservative Party ran up big margins in a small number of places but had trouble broadening its support geographically.
Redistricting would become even more partisan
You think gerrymandering is bad now? Wait until the shape of congressional districts has a direct impact on presidential elections. Virginia has avoided most of that controversy by setting up a bipartisan redistricting commission; when it predictably deadlocked the first time it was used in fall 2021, the task of drawing districts was kicked to the Virginia Supreme Court, who appointed two “special masters” — one from each party — to work together on maps. I think the maps they drew are pretty logical and fair (although I know some Democrats don’t agree and regret that they helped turn the power of mapmaking over to someone else).
Most states, though, have their state legislatures do the job. By definition, those are partisan affairs and would become even more partisan and more litigated.
There’s another way to split electoral votes
Instead of splitting votes by congressional districts, they could be apportioned on a percentage basis. This is called the “whole number proportional system” because you’d have to round up or round down to avoid a fraction of a vote. Generally speaking, though, if a candidate took 60% of the vote in a state — a landslide by our standards — they get 60% of the electoral votes, not 100%. That would force candidates to campaign almost everywhere because even a small increase in the vote share in a state that’s otherwise uncompetitive might result in an extra electoral vote. FairVote.org has done some math to figure out the places most likely to become swing states under that system — among those that would be added would be some states that otherwise aren’t competitive. Specifically: California, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah, a list evenly split between red and blue states where a small shift might help the other party. Under this system, instead of all 13 of Virginia’s electoral votes in 2020 going to Biden, seven would have gone to Biden, six to Trump. (Biden won the state 54.1% to 44.0%.) Every state would wind up having split votes of some kind.
Before anyone gets too excited about this method, consider these implications: FairVote.org says that if this system had been in place in 1968, instead of Richard Nixon winning an electoral vote majority, no one would have — and the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives. Since the House then was overwhelmingly Democratic, it might well have elected Hubert Humphrey instead.
Likewise in 2000, neither Bush nor Gore would have gotten a majority (thanks to Ralph Nader), and that election would have gone to the House, as well. You could get around that by limiting the split in electoral votes to just the top two contenders. Still, the point is, any change in the system might result in outcomes we can’t always predict. (Updated: Obviously I meant 2000 here! Time flies!)
For now, we have the system we have. Our votes in Virginia may not count as much as those in Pennsylvania, but at least within the state, all our votes matter the same.
The candidate voters are most curious about
There are more than 500 candidates on the ballot for local offices across Southwest and Southside. We’ve sent questionnaires to all of them and have posted their responses on our Voter Guide. (If you’re a candidate who hasn’t responded, and you need us to resend the link, let us know at elections@cardinalnews.org.)
Each week in West of the Capital, my weekly political newsletter, I list the five candidates people are searching for most in our Voter Guide. The first week, it was Cameron Craddock Howe, an independent candidate for the Ward 1 council seat in Lynchburg. Last week, it was Billie Jo “B.J.” Roberts, a member of Bluefield Town Council who is seeking reelection. Who will it be this week? That’s just one of the topics I’ll address in this week’s edition of West of the Capital. You can sign up for that or any of our free newsletters below:
