Former President Donald Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen have heeded the call of prominent far-right figure Charlie Kirk to push for Nebraska to change the way it awards Electoral College votes and make the state winner-take-all.
But state GOP legislative leaders have said it's unlikely any changes will happen this year.
Currently, unlike nearly all other states, Nebraska awards two of its five electors to the winner of the state’s popular vote and then splits the other three between its three congressional districts. While a Democrat hasn’t won the deep-red state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, both Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020 won one electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes the city of Omaha. The system was codified in 1991.
“This is a way to guarantee Donald Trump gets another electoral vote. It guarantees another vote to make Donald Trump more likely to be the 47th president of the United States,” Kirk said on his streaming show on Wednesday. “It seems like we might get this fixed, which would be a major blow to Joe Biden.”
On Tuesday, Kirk took to social media and argued that even if Trump flipped Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — three states he lost to Biden in 2020 — he would lose by a single electoral vote in a map otherwise identical to last election. He endorsed a bill proposed by Nebraska GOP legislator, state Sen. Loren Lippincott, that would allocate the state’s electors to the winner of the popular vote. He encouraged his followers to call Pillen’s office and within hours Pillen put out a statement supporting the bill.
“I am a strong supporter of Senator Lippincott’s winner-take-all bill… and I have been from the start,” said Pillen, a Republican. “I call upon fellow Republicans in the Legislature to pass this bill to my desk so I can sign it into law.”
Later on Tuesday night, Trump reposted the statement on social media, calling it “a very smart letter.” He added “let’s hope the Senate does the right things” and encouraged Nebraskans to “respectfully ask” their lawmakers to support the bill.
Kirk then spent Wednesday on his popular streaming show, as well as former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s show, encouraging viewers and listeners to call specific Nebraska legislators, giving out their names and office phone numbers on air. He said he and the political advocacy arm of his organization, Turning Point USA, would be doing an event in Nebraska next Tuesday.
“Now all eyes and the eyes of the nation are on the unicameral Nebraska Legislature. We have to get this out of committee and get it to a floor vote. Now they're doing a lot of different excuses right now. We have to keep on calling, we have to keep the pressure on,” Kirk said. “Let's turn these people into potential heroes. Nebraska, you have the opportunity to save the Republic.”
The bill in question was introduced by Lippincott in January 2023 and has made little progress since then. The Republican chair of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, which is considering the bill, told the Lincoln Journal Star he was “blindsided” by the outpouring from Trump supporters and that his phone “exploded with emails.” The committee chair, state Sen. Tom Brewer, said he hadn’t heard from Pillen about supporting the legislation prior to his Tuesday statement.
Nebraska’s one-chamber legislature ends its session on April 18 and top Republican lawmakers in the state, including Brewer, have thrown cold water on the idea. Even Lippincott told the Journal Star that “for right now, it’s probably stalled in committee.”
“It’s just all about timing and management when it comes to getting bills successfully through the unicameral,” Brewer told the outlet. “And it’s past the 11th hour with this. We just don’t have a way of making it fit.”
"We have a process" Speaker John Arch, a Republican, said in a statement "It includes bill introduction, a committee hearing on every bill and the prioritization of the session’s agenda by the committees and individual members of the Legislature. LB 764 was not prioritized and remains in committee. I’m not able to schedule a bill that is still in committee.”
Brewer described the bill’s supporters as “just people being cranky about it” and said “well, you should have been cranky about it a long time ago.” Kirk framed the proposed change as addressing an existential threat to the country: Trump losing in November.
“You're trying to tell me that if there was a crisis in Nebraska, a natural disaster, they couldn't pass a bill quickly?” Kirk said. “This is urgent. You have a regime that's destroying the country and Nebraska is about to send one of their electoral votes in a goofy way that only one other state does.”
Nebraska Democrats and Biden supporters expressed confidence the bill would not gain traction in the coming weeks — even with the defection of former Democratic Sen. Mike McDonnell, who switched over to the GOP on Wednesday. He told Politico he did not support changing the state’s Electoral College system.
“The majority of our members are conservative but that doesn’t mean we are a partisan institution. We have no majority or minority leaders, no caucuses, and no party leadership,” independent state Sen. Meghan Hunt, who represents Omaha, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “We defend our nonpartisan traditions here fiercely. It’s what works best for Nebraska.”
“It’s pathetic and if [Trump] wants to win Omaha’s vote, he should come earn it,” she also wrote.
Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair told Semafor they believe they have enough votes, despite being outnumbered two-to-one by Republicans, to stop the bill.
Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday that “changing the rules 200 days before the election is ridiculous” and that the one electoral vote in Nebraska that Biden has a shot at winning “really matters.”
The only other state with a similar system, Maine, is currently considering legislation that would eventually tie its Electoral College votes to the national popular vote, even if the popular vote in Maine chooses a different candidate. Even if Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, signs the legislation into law, it almost certainly won’t take effect in 2024.