There’s an interesting report from MSNBC that the Obama campaign appears to be trying to take advantage of a quirk in how Nebraska allocates it’s Electoral Votes:
OMAHA, Neb. - Reliably Republican, Nebraska has been giving the GOP all its electoral votes in every presidential election since 1964. Democratic candidate Barack Obama is trying to take just one of its five votes this year by focusing on Omaha, the state’s biggest, most diverse city.
“If the major competitive states are split, we could be talking about a situation where one electoral vote matters,” said Randall Adkins, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Only Nebraska and Maine divide their electoral votes, though the votes have never actually been split. Obama has opened a campaign office in Omaha to make a play for the electoral vote decided by results in the 2nd Congressional District, which would be essential to victory if the election ended in a 269-269 electoral tie, neither candidate reaching the mandatory 270 electoral votes.
Such a tie could happen, say Nebraska Democrats, if Obama and Republican John McCain were to take most of the states they’re expected to win and if Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico were to switch from Republican to Democrat. Instead of a tie, they say, Obama would win 270-268 if he won the 2nd District.
This isn’t an unusual development, really — George Bush attempted a similar strategy in Maine back in 2004.
When you think about, Nebraska’s Congressional District allocation rule makes alot of sense, as I noted more than a year ago:
First of all, it maintains the Electoral College’s purpose of balancing large states against small ones, and regions against regions while at the same time addressing one of the biggest criticisms of the way that we elect Presidents. By tying at least one electoral vote in each state to a Congressional District, the proposal would put nearly every state into play in a Presidential election. Yes, the proposal would benefit Republicans in California, but it would also benefit Democrats in states like Florida and Texas. In the end, the benefits would probably balance themselves out across the nation, and candidates would be forced to run a campaign that addresses the country as a whole, rather than one that merely focuses on a few big states.
And KipEsquire agrees:
[T]his situation, like those in 2000 and 2004, is further proof that adopting the District Method nationwide would be a perfect compromise between the atrocious winner-take-all status quo and the impossible dream (or, I think, nightmare) of abolishing the Electoral College outright. A fifty-state District Method election would be truly nationwide, with each state competitive to some extent. It would make Bush v. Gore lawsuits incalculably rare (a lawsuit for one electoral vote is far less worthwhile than a lawsuit for 22), and would avoid the intractability of pure popular contests.
Unfortunately, changes like this seldom occur unless there is a crisis to prompt them. Perhaps the right outcome in 2008 will be that prompt.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Not that this is necessarily a big enough negative to say dividing votes by district is a bad thing in balance, but the biggest negative of this system in my mind is that this makes gerrymandering congressional districts an even bigger problem. It will be quite possible that a candidate will win a state substantially and yet not take the bulk of the votes. Furthermore, this could very well make the presidential race an issue at the state level and further perpetuate the breaking down of distinct levels of government as deemed by a federalist system. Many states tend to vote one party for state office and another for president (this is particularly true for southern states that often are dominated by democrats at the state level but overwhelmingly vote republican for president). This distinction could break down if every year an issue is about who the state will pick for president.