OMAHA, Nebraska — It was as heartwarming a display of bipartisan comity as one is likely to see these days: a Democrat standing up to endorse a Republican House candidate in a close-fought swing-district race. At a storefront campaign office, Ann Ashford declared her support for Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who had beaten her late husband, Brad Ashford, in 2016. “I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’m a Harris-Bacon voter. … I believe that there are other Harris-Bacon voters.”
Bacon had better hope so, since the district he represents — Nebraska’s 2nd, where a single presidential electoral vote is also at play — in recent polling appears to have turned decisively against Donald Trump. By a quirk of state law, Nebraska is one of two states to award its presidential electoral votes based on congressional district, not just statewide results. Back in the spring, with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Trump was polling even or sometimes a few points ahead here. But here as elsewhere, Kamala Harris’ ascent to the Democratic nomination has scrambled the map. And among the battlegrounds, this smallest one in an otherwise solidly red state is polling as Harris’ biggest lead. There’s even an outside chance that its one electoral vote could put Harris over the top and into the White House if, for example, Trump were to sweep the Sun Belt battlegrounds and Harris claimed the Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
It didn’t have to be this way for Republicans.
Bacon ruefully acknowledged as much in a chat with reporters after he and Ashford spoke. “I frankly think our district has been an R+3 district,” Bacon said, “if you’re a reasonable conservative that likes to govern. If you’re not, that’s where the numbers are going down.” Bacon, for instance, outran his party by eight points in the Democratic wave year of 2018. (“You hate to outperform your party by eight points,” he said, “but if you gotta do it, you gotta do it.”) In 2020, Biden won the district by more than six points, and Bacon by more than four.
Since then, redistricting has shaved off some Democratic territory in the district and added some Republican territory. Omaha’s Douglas County remains the district’s center of population gravity, but the district is not by definition an obviously blue and urban one: Registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats here, about 38 percent to 35 percent, with much of the remainder officially nonpartisan. Omaha itself has a Republican mayor, and the city council is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. It has not been reliably Democratic in presidential years since going blue in 2008 — both Mitt Romney and Trump have won here previously. And this year among the all-important independents, according to Bacon’s polling, the top issue is the economy — a potentially good one for Republicans.
In other words, it shouldn’t be a slam dunk for Harris, but that’s how it’s shaping up.
The reasons are a mix of both national and Nebraska-specific factors, including the general Harris polling bump over Biden’s numbers in the battlegrounds, the flood of Harris campaign money into the district and the implosion of the state Republican party. Trump, furthermore, has an unorthodox campaign strategy here, one that is heavily reliant on volunteer door-knockers targeting low-propensity voters who, local Republicans say, aren’t showing up in the polls of likely voters. If, however, the current polls are correct — and they had Biden’s margin just about right at this stage in 2020 — Nebraska’s second district will be the battleground that got away from Trump.
There’s a limit to what this says about the election in the rest of the country — the district is whiter, more educated and slightly wealthier than the U.S. average, though it is an average-enough place that Taco Bell uses it as a test market for new products. But the district does get to help pick the president of the United States. It also speaks to the national power of independent voters. It includes slightly Democratic Omaha within evenly split Douglas County, plus a chunk of mixed Sarpy County suburbs, plus all of rural Saunders County, which is not densely populated but is Trump +45. “This district tends to be slightly Republican,” said Randy Adkins, a senior associate dean and political science professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “But the key is always, what are these nonpartisan voters going to do?”
“Swing voters are all about trust,” Bacon said. (The Harris effect is also hitting down-ballot — in current polls, Bacon is a few points behind his Democratic challenger, State Sen. Tony Vargas.) “And [Trump’s] got to gain their trust. … He’s got a record to run on,” including lower inflation, lower illegal immigration and a roaring pre-Covid economy. Bacon has endorsed Trump but also faced the fury of Trump supporters for being among the minority of Republican House members to vote to certify Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“I do think the issues favor us,” Bacon said. “And that’s why, if he ran a good race, he would win.” But as we spoke, Trump was being wildly outspent in the district — as much as 18 to 1, according to Bacon. And though Bacon did not make explicit the implication that Trump was not running a good race in the district, he did acknowledge “it’s a big uphill climb here.”
“I was always boosting Nebraska, and I didn’t want us to have an inferiority complex.” Ben Nelson was the Democratic governor of the state back in the 1990s when he signed the law that gave his state its peculiar electoral situation — one that Republicans have tried to reverse at least 17 times since, and that Democrats in the district celebrate for putting their “blue dot” on the electoral map. Nelson, as a father of the blue dot, was explaining its origins to me at a vice presidential debate watch party in a Union Hall. The theme was heavy on the “Coach Walz” kitsch — the Minnesota governor is a Nebraskan by birth, after all. Harris campaign staffers scurried around in striped referee jerseys, a plastic tablecloth marked like a football field covered the check-in table, a buffet offered mini-Runzas with a paper sign calling them Tim Walz’s favorite. At IBEW Local 22, an inferiority complex was nowhere in evidence.
But when he was governor, said Nelson, who later served as a U.S. senator, his state was political flyover country. “And I think that when you’re looked at as a flyover state, and you sort of think of yourself as a flyover state, you feel like well, maybe we’re sort of left out of the process or left behind in this whole presidential election process.” Perhaps especially galling was that neighboring Iowa got all this attention with its caucuses. Where was Nebraska’s share?
If Nelson was the father of the blue dot, the mother was a then-freshman state senator and former teacher named DiAnna Schimek. At a conference, she’d heard that Maine allocated its electoral votes proportionally. “It intrigued me,” Schimek, now 84, told me, “because I thought it would be fairer. … It would be more representative of the entire state, and it would give people the impetus to get out and work for their candidates and vote.”
She recalled that other states were discussing similar models at the time. In the end, the other states never followed through, but the bill she co-sponsored — with two Democrats and two Republicans — squeaked through the legislature ahead of the 1992 presidential election, 25 to 24. Republicans started trying to repeal it the following session. “I’ve been going to the legislature and testifying every two years” against repeal, Schimek said wearily.
Still, even though Nebraska could in theory split its electoral votes, more than 16 years passed before it actually did so — again due to something of a quirk. In 2008, the Obama campaign had money to burn and its campaign manager David Plouffe made Nebraska’s 2nd his “personal favorite target,” according to his book. (“Let’s try not to have it all come down to Nebraska 2,” Plouffe, now a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, writes of Barack Obama’s reaction. It did not; Obama bested John McCain by 192 electoral votes.) Nebraska 2 was officially a swing district and, if it didn’t always pick winners (see: Romney, 2012), its post-2008 pattern has been to turn against incumbents.
Schimek mostly sat out the late-breaking attempt by Trump supporters this fall to reconvene the legislature in time to subsume the blue dot into its red state for the 2024 election. Even in opposition, the blue dot was getting people to land in flyover country — including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally who flew to Lincoln to press the winner-takes-all case to another state’s legislature. In the end, a single Omaha-area, Democrat-turned-Republican legislator thwarted the effort by saying he wouldn’t support it.
To hear Democrats, some frustrated Republicans and the Washington Post tell it now, at that point for the Trump campaign, the district was once again flyover country.
The Midwest nice way to describe the Nebraska Republican Party at this moment is that it is, like many state Republican parties, in flux. Here as elsewhere, the MAGA wing of the party has wrested control from the traditionalist (and importantly, donor-class) wing, a process that began two years ago and in which Douglas County, where Omaha sits, was the last county party to fall to the populists. It did so at a party convention in April, prompting an exodus of most of the previous executive committee. The county party now has its third chair in six months.
Or you could just dispense with Midwest nice. “It’s nut-TEE,” said Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. “They have no money. Trump Republicans have taken over the entire party infrastructure, which means there’s been total chaos, … and they’re focusing only on state Board of Education races. Tells you everything you need to know.” (Eric Underwood, the chair of the Nebraska GOP, said in a statement: “Previously reliant on a small group of donors, the party has since diversified its funding and expanded its donor base. The party now focuses on rebuilding from the local level up, including races like the State Board of Education, and supports all Constitutional and Platform Republicans on the ballot, including the federal delegation.”) By the time the new leadership took over the Douglas County Republican Party, it had no money left to afford the rent for its offices. The state GOP took over the lease, and the tenants are now the Omaha branch of the Republican National Committee/Trump campaign hybrid called Trump Force 47.
Trump Force 47, per a Republican spokesperson, is a nationwide effort to “have over 100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys across every battleground state.” This person said there are nearly 1,000 in Nebraska 2 alone. The organization has two primary aims: turnout on the one hand, and “election integrity” on the other, to wit, training poll watchers and preparing for post-election legal challenges. The Trump Force 47 Team in Nebraska 2 is four full-time staffers, two for the typical campaign duties (door-knocking and phone banking) and two for the poll worker/watcher training — a setup that reflects Trump’s stated priorities. Nebraska GOP reinforcements push the team up to around a dozen people. (By comparison, the joint Harris/Nebraska Democrats team has 25 full-time paid employees in the district working for Harris and candidates down the ballot.) Their theory of victory is that Biden won the district in 2020 by about 22,000 votes, and that, in combination with other Trump voters, turning out thousands of low-propensity voters will erase this margin.
Jessica Flanagain, who is a Lincoln-based partner at Axiom Strategies and a long-time GOP strategist in Nebraska, said that Harris’ ad spending advantage obscures an aggressive ground game on Trump’s behalf. “In the past few weeks, there has been a notable drop in Harris momentum, coupled with the visible ramp up of Trump Force 47 on-the-ground activity,” she said. “I’ve had different pollsters in different races tell me not to ignore 0 of 4 voters” — meaning registered voters who have not voted in the past four elections — “because they’re going to vote and they’re voting for Trump. This is significant because it’s usually more efficient to change a voter’s mind than to change their behavior.”
Phil and Laura Torrison, who are volunteering for Trump Force 47, are confident it will work. Harris’ polling advantage, Phil said, “doesn’t bother me in the least, because we’re going to go out and we’re going to do what we need to do to negate that.” We were in a stone alcove in a wine bar where the Douglas County Republicans were hosting their own vice presidential debate watch party, about a five-minute drive from the Dems’ — Walz’s Nebraska origins were not a point of pride here, and indeed a cousin of his was in attendance in a “Walz for Trump” T-shirt.
Supposing, however, that the polls do bear out in Nebraska 2, the idea of the district as a difference-maker is not as far-fetched as in previous cycles, according to John Hibbing, a retired University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor who said he gets calls about this every four years from reporters. “I guess I’d have to say this year [the odds are] a little bit less slim” — with Harris somewhat ahead in the “blue wall” states and “in a dogfight” in the Sunbelt battlegrounds. Hibbing does not believe that scenario would be good for Nebraska or the country, however. Locally, he said, it would spell the end of the state’s electoral college experiment. Nationally, given how hard Trump fought a loss by more than 70 electoral college votes, “what would happen if he lost by one or two electoral college votes?”
“I really think,” he said, “that would be a big challenge for the country that I hope we don’t have to witness.”
