Buckle your seat belt. What I am about to tell you is a bone-chilling story about how one man's vote may well determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Because of the outcome of the 2020 census, blue states lost votes in the Electoral College. So, up through 2020, if you combined the math of winning those states that are comfortably blue with the so-called "blue wall" states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a Democrat could gain the presidency with more than the magic 270 electoral votes needed to win. After the census, however, winning the solidly blue states and the "blue wall," which is increasingly looking like President Joe Biden's sole path to re-election, only gets him 269 electoral college votes.
Where does the one additional vote come from? The only state that can push Biden over the finish line is Nebraska. How is it possible that a solidly Republican state can do that? Because Nebraska is only one of two states in the country, the other being Maine, that selects its electors by congressional district. Nebraska's Second Congressional District has gone Democratic for Obama and Biden and is leaning for Biden in current polls, although at reduced margins to his 2020 numbers.
The danger is that the Republican governor of Nebraska has just called a special session of the Nebraska state Legislature and indicated changing Nebraska's Electoral College selection process is top of the agenda. With a winner-take-all system based on state-wide results, Biden would be deprived of the last electoral college vote he needs to win the presidency. The Nebraska Legislature attempted this earlier this year without success, but the stakes are now enormous given the view that Biden, and in all likelihood any Democrats who replaces him if he were to step aside, has only one path to 270. Thus, the Republican Party in Nebraska is intent on changing the rules.
Nebraska is also unique in that it has a unicameral state Legislature. It has only a state senate with no lower house body like the other states. For Republicans to kill the Democratic filibuster that would ensue, the Republicans need 33 votes on a cloture motion. It appears they currently have 32 votes, with a single Republican state senator, who was a Democrat and switched parties, who has resisted this change in the past but will now come under new massive pressure.
That one man is state Sen. Mike McDonald, and has his eye on becoming Omaha's mayor, the largest city in Nebraska's second district. It is not as if Biden has a cakewalk in this district. Omaha's current mayor is Republican, and the congressman from the second district is also Republican. However, it is clear that Omahans like the political leverage that the current Electoral College selection process gives them, and so McDonald is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The timing of a change in the current system also presents another major variable. Based on Nebraska state law, any change to the current voting system cannot take place for 90 days, meaning any electoral college change would have to be signed into law by Aug. 4 in order to be applicable to this November's election. There is an exception to this, however, and that is if the bill were to pass with an emergency clause. Then the 90-day rule would not apply. But any emergency clause passage would also be subject to filibuster and so 33 Republican votes would be necessary for that passage as well.
The timing issue gets even more complicated because Maine has threatened to change to a winner-take-all system if Nebraska takes this action. Maine is a blue state with one Republican district, and so that action would cancel out what Nebraska is attempting to do. The caveat here is that Maine would have to act under its laws by Aug. 4 to effect the November election, making the timing a near-run thing.
So, if Nebraska plays its cards to avoid Maine's counterpunch, it would adopt the change after the August 4 deadline, and, thus, require the additional emergency clause passage.
However, for the Republicans to succeed they are going to need the emergency clause, anyway. Former Democratic state Sen. Adam Morfeld runs Civic Nebraska and Nebraska Votes, two organizations opposing the changes in the Legislature. They have vowed to run a petition drive to gain the 120,000 signatures necessary to put this issue to a referendum if it passes in the Legislature. A referendum would postpone the effective date of any change until after the 2024 election. Still, an emergency clause passage would be able to overcome that tactic as well.
It is not being overly dramatic to say that one congressional district, with one electoral vote, balanced on the vote of one state senator, is the last hope for the United States preserving Democracy as we know it.
There is a desperate need for funds to help drive voters in this district to weigh in and persuade McDonald—or a couple of term-limited moderate Republican senators—to form a bulwark against passage of an emergency clause that would deny Biden re-election. The stakes in Omaha could not be higher—and support for the efforts of Morfeld and his organizations in this critical political beef are desperately needed.
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of Oorbit Gaming and Entertainment, an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, a member of Keep Our Republic (an organization dedicated to preserving the nation's democracy). He is also a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
