Photograph: Danny Wilcox Frazier/The Guardian
For Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the road to the White House runs through battleground states clustered along the Great Lakes, and in the fast-growing “sun belt” of the south. But if the election turns out to be extremely close, the two candidates’ fortunes may hinge on a few hundred thousand voters clustered in a single congressional district in the middle of the country.
This lesser-known front can be found in Nebraska, one of only two states in the country, along with Maine, that allocate a portion of their electoral votes by congressional district, rather than giving all of them to the winner of the state.
In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat in 12 years to win Nebraska’s second congressional district, which encompasses the largest city, Omaha, and its suburbs. The pressure to win a majority of its voters is expected to be even higher this year, as Biden looks to fend off a resurgent Trump while reassuring Democrats that he can still do the job after his troubling performance in their first debate.
While much of the candidates’ attention is focused on the seven swing states expected to decide the election (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia) the Biden campaign also counts winning the Nebraska district as among its priorities – so much so that some Trump allies are encouraging the state’s Republican lawmakers to change their rules to ensure the former president wins the entirety of its electoral votes.
“I think the district is probably going to get more attention this time than it did even in 2020,” said Ryan Horn, a Republican media strategist who splits his time between Omaha and Washington DC.
Though Biden won its vote in 2020, the district was then not essential to his victory, since he also triumphed in all the battleground states that Trump had won four years earlier, albeit narrowly. But polls indicate the Democrat’s standing with voters has weakened since then, and it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the race does come down to the urbanized and relatively diverse district spread across three counties on Nebraska’s eastern flank.
If Trump wins Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and a Republican-leaning district in Maine, but Biden wins the three traditionally Democratic Great Lakes states and Nebraska’s congressional district, that would give the president the 270 votes he needs to clinch re-election. But if the Nebraska district flips to Trump, that would tie the candidates with 269 electoral votes each, and the House of Representatives would determine the election’s outcome. Each state’s delegation would get one vote, and Republicans would have the advantage: the GOP controls 26 delegations and Democrats 22, while two are tied.
Unlike in the battleground states, there are few publicly available polls of the second congressional district’s voters. In interviews, local Democrats and the Biden campaign sounded optimistic about the president’s chances of once again winning what they call Nebraska’s “blue dot”.
“Trump is too extreme for the second congressional district,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party.
The state began splitting its electoral votes in the 1992 election, and prior to 2020, the district had only once before supported a Democrat, giving Barack Obama a one-percentage-point victory in 2008. Four years ago, Biden beat Trump by a six-percentage-point margin in the region of more than 650,000 people, which in addition to African American and Hispanic communities includes many of the sorts of suburbs that have become key to Democratic victories nationwide.
In March, second gentleman Doug Emhoff made a visit to Omaha focused on reproductive rights – an issue on which Democrats hope to rally voters nationwide, even in conservative states. The party is also backing efforts to get initiatives legalizing medical cannabis and protecting abortion access onto Nebraska’s November ballot.
It’s unclear what infrastructure the Trump campaign has deployed in the district, and spokespeople for the former president did not respond to emails seeking comment. Republicans are the dominant party statewide, controlling the legislature, the governor’s mansion and the entire congressional delegation, but the state party has been gripped by infighting ever since officials casting themselves as more aligned with Trump took over two years ago.
Earlier this year, conservative activist Charlie Kirk pressured Nebraska lawmakers to support changing to a winner-take-all system for allocating its electoral votes.
But a push to do that in the legislature failed, and though the Republican governor, Jim Pillen, said he was willing to reconvene lawmakers to implement the change, he will only do so if enough support exists for the measure to pass.
“I believe this practice is inconsistent with our constitutional founding, out of step with most of the rest of America, and signals disunity,” Pillen wrote late last month, as he convened a special session intended to lower property taxes. “I continue to await a signal that support exists within the legislature to justify a special session to address the winner take all issue.”
Malia Shirley, an executive director of the Nebraska Freedom Coalition, which was among the leaders of the takeover of the state Republican party, believes the GOP will ultimately come together to change the state’s electoral vote allocation.
“It’s not about Trump, it’s about conservative values, it’s about the state of Nebraska, it’s about doing what is best for Nebraskans,” Shirley said. “And, rest assured, if Democrats were in the position that we’re in, they would not hesitate or even think twice to leverage the tools and the rules that are already in place to be able to further their agenda.”
Changing to a winner-take-all system has been debated by Nebraska lawmakers in the past, and has ultimately gone nowhere because of hesitancy by Omaha-area Republicans who see benefits to the district’s economy from the political attention.
“Historically, there’s always been one or two of these that just doesn’t want to go along with this, because they know that, while it might be good for Republicans or Donald Trump in the short term, it’s bad for the state in the long term,” he said. “Because the minute you go to winner take all is the minute that no one involved in a race for president gives a shit about the state of Nebraska anymore, because it’s no longer in play.”
John Hibbing, a retired political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, predicts that if Trump or Biden’s fate comes down to Nebraska’s second district, “it would be a disaster”. While he views the outcome as unlikely, Hibbing said the concerted effort by Trump and his supporters to cast Biden’s victory four years ago as illegitimate serves as as a poor omen for what would happen if the district were pivotal to the election outcome.
“If they made a big to-do out of things when it wasn’t close, what [is it] going to look like if it really should come down to just one district? I think it would be bad,” he said.
