Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped

Donald Trump wanted Nebraska Republicans to change the state’s electoral vote rules — in a way that would likely flip one electoral vote from Kamala Harris to him.

But he may not have the votes to get it done — a key state senator confirmed Monday that he was still opposed to the rules change.

Nebraska currently has an unusual way of distributing its five electoral votes. Rather than giving them all to the statewide winner — as 48 other states do — it awards two votes to the statewide winner, and the rest go to the winner in each of Nebraska’s three congressional districts.

Nebraska is a deep red state that Trump won by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, Joe Biden walked away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District, which includes the city of Omaha. Trump wants to switch this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote.

The stakes are enormous: the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District really could determine whether Trump or Harris wins in 2024.

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An earlier Trump push to change Nebraska’s rules failed to get the votes back in April. And if it had succeeded, Democrats had an obvious option for a response: changing the rules in Maine. Maine is the only other state that splits its vote by congressional district, but there, the current rule benefits Trump — it delivered him one elector in a state Biden won. Democrats could, in theory, have changed Maine’s rules and cancel out any advantage gained by Trump.

But Trump’s allies suddenly revived the Nebraska rules change effort last week, and that timing may not have been a coincidence: It is now too late for Maine to change its rules, since bills take 90 days after they are passed to become law in the state.

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