I wanted to update you on the situation in Nebraska that we discussed at the end of last week. In short, Republicans were making another run at changing Nebraska’s electoral vote allocation system to winner-take-all, a change which under an unlikely but not far-fetched scenario could hand Trump the presidency. That second bite at the apple looked particularly ominous since it appears that Maine may have lost its opportunity to make the same change and thus neutralize the effort in Nebraska. As we noted on Friday, trying doesn’t mean succeeding. And observers in Nebraska seemed at least skeptical that things had really changed since Republicans tried to do so at Donald Trump’s instigation. There were some articles out of the Nebraska press over the weekend that suggested there was still little chance Republicans could get the votes to make this change. But today we have a report out of Nebraska that the guy who seemed to be the pivotal vote seems to have given a categorical no. State Sen. Mike McDonnell (R) said: “Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support. I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.”

I wanted to take a look at the polling news from this weekend and try to help you make some sense of where the race is. Obviously I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in November or necessarily which polls to believe. But I think I can provide some overview of and context for why different polls might seem to show different things, and how to think about that difference. Yesterday, NBC News released a poll showing Harris beating Trump by 5 points nationwide and 6 points if third-party candidates were added. Another national poll from CBS showed Harris 4 points up over Trump nationwide. But it was the NBC poll which got the most attention because poll watchers still give some extra credit to the big, largely phone-based polls from the major national media organizations.

Obviously, no single poll should bulk too large in anyone’s thinking. But what gave the NBC News poll a lot of attention wasn’t so much the result, which was obviously good for Harris, as the fact that it tended to match and confirm and perhaps amplify the trends we’ve seen from a lot of other polls since the debate. Those polls show Harris solidifying a small national lead, consolidating small leads in the Blue Wall states while running about even through the southern tier swing states. There’s been a large volume of polls showing that. But people wanted to see one of those big, high-priced, phone-based polls say the same thing. In part, that was because you have the Times-Siena poll, which as I’ve explained in the past is very respected but also has a totally disproportionate impact on the media narrative about the race, saying something different. That poll has continued to show a much closer race than the great majority of other polls. A nationwide poll from last week from Times-Siena showed a tied race at 47 percent after one a few weeks earlier that showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point. So that NBC poll wasn’t just another solid poll for Harris. It made it seem a bit more like Times-Siena is an outlier. Not wrong necessarily but an outlier from the majority of campaign.

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.