Chutzpah in Omaha: Trumpists Reveal Their 2020 Complaints Were a Bunch of Bull
Republicans are fine with changing the rules just before an election—as long as they’re the ones who benefit.
REPUBLICANS OFTEN SAY THAT Democrats will do anything to win elections.
In 2020, when Donald Trump lost, Republicans claimed that blue states cheated by “changing the rules” to facilitate absentee voting. Now Republicans warn that Democrats, if they win this year, will abolish the Electoral College to disempower red states.
The GOP pretends that its criticisms of Democrats are about principle. One principle, supposedly, is that it’s wrong to change the rules just before an election. Another is that presidents should be chosen by states—not by a national popular vote—so that communities of all kinds, urban or rural, can have a say.
This is a farce. Republicans have no real principles about the Electoral College or about changing the rules. And the proof of their insincerity is what they just attempted in Nebraska.
Over the past week, Trump and his allies, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, lobbied Nebraska state senators to change the state’s electoral system. They wanted Nebraska to scrap what is, in effect, a mini-Electoral College, in which presidential candidates are rewarded for winning individual congressional districts. Instead, they pushed for a statewide winner-take-all system, which would net an extra electoral vote for Trump.
For now, the attempt has failed. But it exposed the truth about Trump, Graham, and many other Republicans: They’re happy to change the rules and impose a popular-vote system, as long as it serves their interests.
Every year, Democrats talk about replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote. And every year, Graham denounces the idea. “When they want to do away with the Electoral College, that’s telling every rural American to go to hell,” Graham told Fox News five years ago. In a popular-vote system, he warned, “Los Angeles and New York would decide who’s the president. The Electoral College allows rural America to have a say.”
Graham didn’t just laud the diversity of political power fostered by the Electoral College. He argued that proposals to get rid of it were part of a ruthless left-wing war on inconvenient rules and norms. Two years ago, he declared:
In America, the radical Left is hell-bent on reshaping institutions that have stood in the way of the outcomes they desire. They want to pack the Supreme Court to change the current conservative nature of the Court which was achieved through the democratic process. They intend to abolish the Electoral College to shift power away from rural states to large, blue states. . . . When it comes to outcomes, the radical Left will do whatever they view as necessary—institutions be damned.
That theme—that the left always tries to change the rules to get what it wants—pervaded the GOP’s outcry over Trump’s defeat in 2020. Trump’s claims of fraud didn’t pan out, but Republicans insisted the election was corrupt anyway, because states had modified their voting procedures to deal with COVID.
Two weeks after that election, Rep. Mike Johnson (who wasn’t yet the speaker of the House) said that he had talked to Trump and that “there was a lot amiss about this election” because “all these states with Democrat leaders changed the rules in the fourth quarter of the game. They decided to allow all these late mail-in ballots.” Johnson contended that “when the president says the election was rigged, that’s what he’s talking about.”
Rep. James Comer (who wasn’t yet chairman of the House Oversight Committee) concurred. In January 2021, a few days before Trump’s followers attacked the Capitol, Comer groused on Fox News that many states had “changed the rules in the middle of the game with respect to absentee voting.” He called these changes “irregularities” worthy of investigation.
Today, Trump and his allies continue to decry the election-law modifications of 2020. “State election officials changed the rules in the middle of the game,” said John Lauro, one of Trump’s attorneys, on Meet the Press last year. Based on those changes, Lauro argued, Trump had good reason to challenge the results.
What just happened in Nebraska shows that all of these protestations were a joke.
FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS, Nebraska has had a hybrid system, in which two of the state’s five electors go to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote, and the other three are determined by who gets the most votes in each of the state’s three congressional districts.
On principle, Graham should favor this system, since it empowers each part of the state. But sometimes, the system doesn’t work out for Graham’s party. Nebraska’s second congressional district (NE 02), which leans Republican, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and for Joe Biden in 2020. In each case, the district cost the GOP one electoral vote.
This year, polling shows Kamala Harris beating Trump in the district. And that could be crucial. If Trump wins Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina—but Kamala Harris wins Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and NE 02—she’ll win the Electoral College, 270–268. But if Trump gets all of Nebraska’s five votes, that’s a 269–269 tie. In that scenario, the U.S. House of Representatives would break the tie, with each state’s delegation casting one vote. And because Republicans control more delegations, Trump would prevail.
Trump could win NE 02 the honest way, by competing for the votes of the people who live there. Instead, he and Graham just tried to change the rules.
Last Wednesday, Graham flew to Nebraska. He didn’t go there to talk to voters in NE 02. He went to the governor’s mansion, where he met with Republican state senators and urged them to hold an emergency session in which they’d pass a bill that would take away NE 02’s electoral vote. During these meetings, Trump got on the phone to join in the lobbying. “This is important to me,” Trump told one senator.
Some senators felt uneasy about “meddling with election law so close to the general election,” according to the Nebraska Examiner. But Graham advised them to focus on winning, not on the propriety of changing the law. One senator told the Examiner that Graham and Trump stressed the importance of getting the extra electoral vote and beating Harris.
Advocates for NE 02 made the same argument that Graham, at a national level, routinely makes for the Electoral College. They pointed out that the district gets attention from presidential candidates only because it’s a swing district and has its own electoral vote. If it gets absorbed into the statewide popular vote, which is reliably Republican, its residents will be ignored, and the millions spent in the Omaha market would disappear.
Clearly, that argument didn’t deter Graham. Nor, with few exceptions, did it deter the state’s Republican legislators. Some even claimed that stripping NE 02 of its electoral vote would “ensure that rural voices are heard.” That’s a spectacularly dishonest way to describe the deliberate suppression of Nebraska’s most urban district.
Even Rep. Don Bacon, the Republican who currently serves NE 02 in Congress, signed a letter from the state’s congressional delegation calling for a winner-take-all system. “We are Nebraskans first, not members of Nebraska’s three congressional districts,” said the letter. So much for representing your constituents.
All of these moves—Graham’s visit, Trump’s phone call, and the letter from Bacon and his colleagues—took place on September 18. Why is that significant? Because it was 90 days before December 17, when the Electoral College will meet. As Sam Stein pointed out last week in The Bulwark, the closure of that 90-day window means that Maine—which leans toward the Democrats and distributes its electoral votes the same way Nebraska does—can effectively no longer change its own laws to counteract a change in Nebraska. By waiting until last week to launch their lobbying blitz, Republicans ensured that winner-take-all could be imposed in the state where that rule works in their favor, but not in the state where it would hurt them.
The campaign to upend Nebraska’s system has failed for the time being, largely because one Republican state senator representing Omaha decided it was too close to the election to make such a change. But the saga has laid bare the cynicism of Trump, Graham, and their allies. They don’t care about electoral diversity or preserving “institutions.” They certainly have no compunctions about “changing the rules in the fourth quarter.” All they care about is winning.