Nebraska, Maine could play pivotal role in presidential race

OMAHA, Neb. — Nebraska will never be mistaken for a swing state given that it hasn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, but if the race is close this fall, the state could have a key role in choosing the next president.

It’s all thanks to a law approved decades ago that was intended to attract presidential candidates to a state they usually ignore because it’s so reliably conservative.

While the statewide vote will clearly go to President Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden has a good chance of winning in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, meaning one of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes could go to the Democrat.

But there’s a problem with that scenario: Maine.

Maine is the only other state that awards Electoral College votes by congressional district, and it could go the opposite way and award a vote to Trump even as the state as a whole likely will go to Biden.

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Shirl Mora James, a leader in the Nebraska Democratic Party, said with a sigh. “I’ve been working the phones in Pennsylvania. Maybe I need to be making calls in Maine.”

Although Nebraska and Maine take the same approach to awarding Electoral College votes — two votes for the overall winner plus votes for the winner of each congressional district — they had different motivations for their laws.

In Maine, legislators approved the new approach in 1969 in hopes of better representing voters who might be on the losing end of the statewide count but were still a substantial minority.

Nebraska arrived at the same system more than 20 years later, but lawmakers focused more on gaining the attention of presidential candidates. A Democratic legislator, DiAnna Schimek, recalled Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy’s 11-city whistle stop campaign across the state in 1968 and convinced enough Republicans that by changing the Electoral College system, the state could return to relevance.

“That was when Nebraska mattered,” Schimek reminisced recently.

Or as longtime Democratic activist Patricia Zieg put it, without Nebraska’s current system, “We’d just be a warm North Dakota.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/34oBcdu