What if all states adopted Nebraska’s ‘blue dot’ approach for president?
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If every state adopted Nebraska’s unique system of awarding its Electoral College votes for president — which provides one electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district and two per state to the overall winner — President-elect Donald Trump would have still won the White House.
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But his margin of victory would have been slimmer.
A Nebraska Examiner analysis found that Trump would have won the popular vote in 229 congressional districts compared to wins by Vice President Kamala Harris in 206 districts, according to results compiled by national political analyst Drew Savicki.
Trump would have secured another 62 electoral votes by winning the statewide popular vote in 31 of 50 states, giving him 291 electoral votes, 21 more than needed to win the White House.
That result under a district-led system would have resulted in Trump winning 21 fewer electoral votes than were cast for him Monday, based on the current system of counting electoral votes, in which 48 states award all the electoral votes from those states to the popular vote winner statewide. His margin of victory over Harris would have been a narrower 291-247.
How the election worked in 2024
The real 2024 vote, based on the winner-take-all system used by every state except Nebraska and Maine, gave the Republican nominee a victory margin of 312 to 226 over Harris, the Democratic nominee.
The analysis comes as the Nebraska Legislature is poised again to consider whether to rescind the state’s unique system of awarding electoral votes and return to a winner-take-all approach, the law in the state until 1991.
This time, Nebraska provided four of its five electoral votes to Trump — two for winning the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts and two for winning the state overall. Harris secured one by winning in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District.
Two political science professors asked to comment on the Examiner’s analysis said they were not surprised by the results. The so-called “district system” used by Nebraska and Maine would rarely make a difference in the election outcome, they said.
Randy Adkins of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Dona-Gene Barton of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said there’s no doubt that using the district system has brought additional attention from campaigns and the media to Nebraska’s 2nd District, the so-called “blue dot.”
It did so because it has delivered electoral votes to Democrats three times since 2000 in a Republican-dominated state.
“Most of the time, it doesn’t make a difference,” Adkins said.
What the change might mean
But if all states adopted the system of awarding electoral votes by congressional district, more presidential campaigns would be spread out across the country, instead of focusing mostly on a handful of battleground states, Adkins said.
“All of a sudden, Republicans are campaigning in California and Democrats in Texas,” he said.
In this past election campaign, the UNO professor said he was interviewed by 200 reporters, from as far away as Japan, Austria and France. Most wanted to know about the possible impact of the blue dot on the outcome of the November election.
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“Omaha got national and international attention from that,” Adkins said of the district approach to electoral votes. “It puts Omaha into discussions that didn’t exist before.”
Had all states adopted Nebraska’s system, it would have made a difference in an outcome at least once: Americans would have elected Mitt Romney president in 2012 rather than Barack Obama.
Obama won the popular vote by nearly 5 million votes and won in the Electoral College by a 332-206 margin. But if the electoral votes had been divided up by who got the most votes in each congressional district, Romney would have won by a margin of 273-262 — three more than needed for the White House.
Nationally, some Republicans sought for a time to change the way their states divvied up electoral votes from a winner-take-all system to the district way because of the 2012 election.
But generally, Republicans have preferred the Electoral College because it tends to favor GOP candidates, who do better in rural, less populated states and do worse in big cities and more populated states.
Public opinion polls, meanwhile, regularly indicate support for getting rid of the Electoral College, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and using the popular vote for president.
Democrats have favored such a switch. After all, two Democrats, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2008 won the popular vote but lost the presidency in the Electoral College. Given that Trump won both the popular and electoral votes in 2024, there hasn’t been as much talk of ditching the Electoral College.
A major gripe about the Electoral College is that it gives each state two votes for the popular vote winner in that state — one each of its two U.S. senators. That means that the nation’s least-populous state, Wyoming, with about 585,000 residents, has as much clout in that regard as the biggest state, California, which has a population of nearly 39 million.
Nebraska Republicans eye ‘blue dot’
In Nebraska, GOP leaders, led by Governor Jim Pillen, have long called for returning to a winner-take-all system. He maintains that it would allow the state’s voters to speak with one voice, and end the “undue influence” of the Omaha-area’s “blue dot.”
Defenders of the district system, meanwhile, say it allows voters’ voices to be heard in states — like Nebraska — where the politics in each congressional district are different.
Republicans in Nebraska’s GOP-dominated Legislature made two last-minute tries in 2024 to get rid of the district system after anxiety rose that Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, in a possibly close election, might tilt the election to Harris.
As it turned out, Harris’ win in the “blue dot” didn’t matter, because Trump easily won the election after sweeping nearly all seven “battleground” states that swing back and forth between favoring Democrats or Republicans.
That is another common criticism of the winner-take-all approach, because a nationwide election comes down to a few battleground states and tend to ignore the others.
Former State Senator Mike McDonnell, a Democrat-turned-Republican, was a critical “no” vote against switching to winner-take-all despite his change of political party.
McDonnell, who is now a candidate for mayor of Omaha, said the current district system brought increased attention and campaign spending to the Omaha area that would disappear if Nebraska adopted a winner-take-all system.
The way forward
Harris’ win in the Omaha area was the third time that a Democrat had emerged as the winner in the 2nd District. The other wins came in 2008 by Obama and in 2020 by Joe Biden.
The latest win has prompted Pillen to again urge the Legislature to do away with the state’s district system.
State Senator Loren Lippincott of Central City proposed Legislative Bill 3 on Thursday that would shift the state to a winner-take-all system. It would award all five of the state’s electoral votes to the statewide winner of the presidential popular vote.
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Whether or not that happens is up in the air — Republicans have 33 senators in the Legislature, enough to fend off a filibuster and pass a change in voting laws. But it remains to be seen if every GOP state senator would support such a switch.
At least a couple want state voters, at the ballot box via a proposed constitutional amendment, to decide.
Adkins said that 150 years ago, there was more discussion by states about switching to a district system similar to what Nebraska and Maine use.
He said states can adopt the district system without amending the U.S. Constitution, which he said would be easier than amending the constitution to get rid of the Electoral College.
Barton, the UNL professor, said she doesn’t see any momentum nationally to get rid of the Electoral College, given that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House.
She said changing back to a winner-take-all system would end the political attention focused on the 2nd District, because Nebraska, as a whole, has reliably voted for Republican candidates for the past 60 years.
“I think that would be a bad move for Nebraska, if the state wants to be part of the election campaign,” Barton said.
Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Aaron Sanderford for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com.
