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I suspect this won’t matter. A lot of facts aren’t known. And I’m not sure all the players have yet put their cards on the table. But I wanted to address the topic Nicole put on your radar yesterday. Republicans are making another push to change the electoral law in Nebraska and thus take away a single electoral vote which Kamala Harris is likely but by no means guaranteed to win. We start by making clear that Nebraska has every right to do this. All but two states allocated their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. It’s shifty and inappropriate to do it so late in the cycle for a clearly partisan purpose. But there’s no issue here of voting rights or election rigging. They can do this. I should note here that I don’t think it will end up making a difference. But, yeah … it could. It’s certainly possible that Donald Trump could become president again because of this.
Now, we don’t know whether Nebraska Republicans will be able to come up with the votes. We’ll come back to that. But if you remember when this came up earlier in the year, Maine (the other state with this system) said it would also make the change if Nebraska did. In other words, if Nebraska made the change, then Maine would counter and cancel it out. Nebraska Republicans were struggling to come up with the votes anyway. So that seemed to be the end of it. There wasn’t any point.
Then a few days ago Republicans started making another push. When I first saw this I thought, well, what’s the point? Maine is locked and loaded to counter and neutralize it. Well … about that. At the time Democratic leaders in Maine made very clear that they were ready to do this. The Democratic House Majority Leader put out a statement. It is my strong recollection they also said that if Nebraska came back and tried to do it later they’d counter it then. So basically: don’t try, Nebraska Republicans. There’s no point. But then I noticed earlier this week a reporter saying that a new law takes 90 days to go into effect in Maine. So Maine has run out of time. Certainly, I thought, this reporter had her facts wrong. But then I noticed that the reporter had previously worked at one of the papers in Maine, which kind of shook my confidence a bit. You see where we’re going here. This seems to be true. In Maine, a law takes 90 days to go into effect. Nebraska has no such restriction. You can overrule that with a super-majority. But Maine Democrats don’t have legislative supermajorities. We’re way under 90 days before the election. But critically we’re now under 90 before electoral votes are cast on December 16th.
When I first saw all this I thought I must be missing something. Certainly it was reasonable to figure that the leaders of the state legislature in Maine had a handle on the rules for passing laws in Maine. But it seems like maybe they didn’t? And since the new Republican effort seemed to start up almost to the day after the 90-day limit passed, it really seems like they were waiting for that moment to begin another effort.
I mean, seriously, WTF?
So far, I haven’t seen anyone in a position of actual authority in Maine — the Democratic state legislative leaders, the Democratic governor — address the calendar issue. Maybe they know they’ve got it covered? Maybe they knew they goofed and they’re trying to come up with a workaround? The reporting on this has so far been very limited so it’s not clear to me whether this is something in Maine’s constitution or whether it is a legislative rule, in which case legislatures can often meet as committees of the whole and re-write their legislative rules. In other words, I think we still need to know a bit more about what the nitty gritty details are in Maine.
We also don’t know whether they really have the votes in Nebraska to do this. There seemed to be significant Republican resistance to doing this at the time. Some of that is just generalized resistance at electoral game-playing. Some of it is more focused on the fact that it requires people from the district which gets to choose its own elector to give that up. What all this adds up to is that it’s not clear they can get the votes to do this in Nebraska. But truly having the presidency on the line has a way of concentrating people’s attention. I would not put a lot of money on them not being able to do it. That’s another factual question we need to see more reporting on.
In any case, that is where this stands. I think it’s pretty unlikely this will matter. But it’s not too hard to imagine a situation in which it does. Have Harris win the three Blue Wall states but lose Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina and she only becomes president with that single Nebraska electoral vote. That’s not a crazy scenario. But elections tend to fall more clearly in one direction or another. Beyond the consequences of this imbalanced switch, if it happens, it remains stunning to me if we’re here because the top political officials in Maine either hadn’t figured on this rule or hadn’t thought out its potential impact in this scenario.
I’ll keep you posted as I find out more details on this.