Shana Callahan says that in Nebraska, family is everything [BBC]
Shana lives in the one small part of this vast, rural state that may find itself with an outsized impact on November’s election result.
Under the US system, each state is allocated a specific number of votes in what’s known as the electoral college. Presidential candidates need to reach 270 votes to win the White House.
Unlike most of the rest of America, where all the electoral college votes in each state go to the winner of the popular vote, Nebraska does things differently.
Three of its five votes are decided by whoever wins three individual districts.
Nebraska is a reliably Republican state but its second district – worth one vote – went to Trump in 2016, to Biden in 2020, and this time round there’s a scenario in which whoever wins it could win the whole election.
If Harris wins the Rust Belt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and Trump takes the Sun Belt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada then the second district would provide the single tie-breaking vote.
District two is a microcosm of America, with the heavily Democrat-leaning city of Omaha balanced by the Republican-leaning outskirts and the countryside beyond.
In their backyard in the centre of Omaha, Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown are spraying giant blue dots on plain white lawn signs.
“We’re like a little swing state within a state,” Jason tells me. “It could absolutely, I guess you would say, be a history-changing moment. This could really be the ultimate one vote that matters.”
In an effort to keep the “blue dot” blue, the Harris-Walz campaign has been massively outspending Trump-Vance here, pouring millions into TV advertising.
Ruth tells me she believes it’s having an effect on the doorsteps.
“When they talk about Walz he’s very relatable. He’s, you know, one of us. And, you know, they just trust him.”
“And I think a lot of people are very tired of the divisiveness and the bitterness and he’s, he’s anything but that.”
A blue dot signifies Ruth Huebner-Brown wants the Second District to vote Democrat [BBC]
There’s plenty of divisiveness in Nebraska.
Even here, deep in the American countryside, you can hear the unsubstantiated assertions that large numbers of immigrants are unlawfully claiming Social Security or engaging in ballot fraud.
One Republican voter admits his belief in such claims is based not on fact, but on what he’s heard, with echoes of JD Vance’s similar justification for his promotion, without evidence, of the allegation that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Ohio.
A soybean farmer tells me that Kamala Harris is a “DEI hire”; another says it is white people who are being discriminated against in today’s America.
Yet, on the Democratic side, there are signs of groupthink too – the bafflement over the choices of their opponents and a readiness to see all Republican voters as motivated by the narrow politics of prejudice.
But there’s something else unique about Nebraska’s electoral system. Its state legislature is nonpartisan, meaning it does not recognise the party affiliations of its elected members nor organise them around formal party voting blocs.
In the city of Hastings, Michelle Smith is out canvassing for a seat in that local legislature.
She’s a Democrat fighting for votes in a very red district, but, she says, the system encourages compromise.
“My own father is one of those people who’s going to vote for Donald Trump, and I understand it,” she tells me.
“I’m a business owner. I paid less taxes when Donald Trump was president. Our prices were lower at the grocery store.”
How does she campaign?
“I bring it down to the local issues. I’m not a national candidate. I’m a local candidate, and I’m running to make things better here in Nebraska.”
Michelle Smith, a Democrat, is running for local office [BBC]
For now, Nebraska is very much in the national spotlight.
There’s been a last-minute attempt by the Republican Party not to leave anything to chance, with several lawmakers pushing for a move to make the state a winner-takes-all system.
Barring the completely unexpected, that would mean all the state’s electoral college votes go to Donald Trump.
It foundered, though, on the opposition of a few local Republican senators, who refused to bow to the pressure this close to an election, placing what they saw as the interests of the state – given the rare bit of political leverage the system provides – over that of national partisan politics.
Even Lindsey Graham, the powerful Republican senator, flew in to meet with the holdouts, but to no avail.
“It was interesting,” he’s reported to have said back in Washington. “They have a different system. Everybody’s like a mini-governor.”
Whether or not Nebraska plays an outsized role in November’s deeply divided contest, it may offer something of an alternative to it.
[BBC]
More on the US election
[BBC]
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
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Publish date : 2024-09-29 13:52:00
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