Pillen’s announcement late Tuesday was an acknowledgment that the effort to change the state to a winner-take-all system won’t pass immediately — and may not happen at all. But it will keep the possibility alive.
“I look forward to partnering with legislative leaders to [move] it forward in a special session, when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it,” Pillen posted on X. “I will sign [winner-take-all] into law the moment the Legislature gets it to my desk.”
The state has for decades divided its electoral votes in an unusual system where the statewide vote winner gets two electoral votes and the vote winner in each of the state’s three congressional districts gets one vote.
In 2020, now-President Joe Biden carried the state’s Omaha-based 2nd District, securing one of the state’s five electoral votes. He was the first Democrat to do so since Barack Obama in 2008.
That single electoral college vote was ultimately irrelevant in 2020, when Biden won the electoral college by a healthy margin. But it could be critical come November if the election is tighter. If the district system remained in place, Biden could win the presidency just by winning Nebraska’s 2nd District and the Midwestern battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in addition to safely Democratic states.
But should Nebraska go to a winner-take-all system, Trump has an easier path to the White House. If he won every state he carried in 2020 and flipped Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, the two men would be deadlocked at 269 electoral votes each.
That would kick the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote as a delegation — a contest Republicans would almost assuredly win.
Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican who represents the Omaha-area district and is a top target for Democrats in November, also backed the push to change how the state casts its electoral votes Tuesday. “I think it undermines the influence of Nebraska,” he told CNN. “I think it should be standardized.”
While there have been attempts in the past to change the system, they have largely gone nowhere in Nebraska’s Legislature, which uniquely has one technically nonpartisan chamber.
But close allies of Trump, including Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, launched an eleventh-hour push in recent weeks to change the system. Pillen endorsed the effort earlier this month, which quickly got the attention of Trump, who also backed the effort.
The state Republican Party and Turning Point hosted a rally Tuesday night to rally support for the effort.
“Nebraska could pick a president,” Kirk said at the rally. “You better believe that that message is being heard in the Capitol. … If we have to come back and do another one, we will because this is a question of the will.”
Only one other state divides its electoral votes by district: Maine. Trump is highly likely to carry Maine’s 2nd District despite the overall blue tint of the state. Maine Democrats have so far shown little appetite for changing their system.
It’s still unclear if there is enough support in the Nebraska Legislature to make the switch. Legislators who register as Republicans now have a filibuster-proof majority in the unicameral, after state Sen. Mike McDonnell announced he was switching parties earlier this month.
But he told POLITICO in a text last week that despite his party switch, he was “voting against changing the electoral vote structure in the state of Nebraska.” POLITICO also reported that privately, at least a handful of GOP legislators didn’t support the effort.
Attempts to tack on the winner-take-all change to other legislation failed, with the overwhelming majority of the chamber voting that it was not relevant last week.
And Democrats have pushed back strongly against the proposed change. Biden’s campaign has been in private talks with the state Democrats, POLITICO reported last week, and the state party continues to publicly hammer the efforts to change the law.
“Pillen is throwing [the Legislature] under the bus because the votes are NOT there to change our electoral vote system,” Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, posted Wednesday on X. “He is giving himself lots of political cover.”