Maine’s Democratic House, Majority Leader Maureen, has revealed the Democrat Party may have missed an opportunity to change the state’s Electoral College allocation to ” a winner-take-all format.”
Currently, Maine gives a portion of its delegates to presidential candidates based on each congressional district they win.
This means Kamala’s chances of getting all four delegates in Maine are in Jeopardy.
Under the same format, President Trump gained one delegate in the 2020 election, and Biden garnered three.
The only other state that splits the delegates is Nebraska.
Now that the Maine deadline has passed, Republican lawmakers in Nebraska are attempting to change their hybrid system to a winner-take-all system that will guarantee Trump an extra delegate.
In 2020, Trump won four of Nebrask’s delegates, and Biden, who won the district of Omaha, was awarded one.
Now that Nebraska is looking to change to a winner-take-all format and Maine cannot counter Nebraska’s move, Trump could snag +2 delegates in a highly contentious presidential race.
If Nebraska Rs switch the state to winner-take-all, and it’s too late for Maine to do the same, the impact could be enormous.
Namely, WI-MI-PA would no longer be enough to get Harris to 270.
She’d need at least one more swing state (NV, GA, AZ, or NC) to get over the line pic.twitter.com/XONmKUgLti
— Andrew Prokop (@awprokop) September 19, 2024
And any hope that Democrat legislators here in Maine might balance a Nebraska elector move seems to have evaporated given the tight timeline to #Election2024 @samstein :
> https://t.co/o8E86MANgd https://t.co/zPu5kRdWZu pic.twitter.com/q3VCxzs8JR— Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ (@Revkin) September 20, 2024
Per the Bulwark:
A top Maine Democrat acknowledged on Thursday that there’s likely not enough time to change the state’s Electoral College rules before the election to counterbalance Nebraska Republicans trying to alter their own state’s rules to benefit Donald Trump.
Democratic House Majority Leader Maureen Terry told The Bulwark in a brief phone conversation that the party had “very possibly” missed a window to alter the state’s Electoral College allocation to a winner-take-all format.
That could leave the party, and Vice President Kamala Harris, with a much narrower path to the presidency.
Maine is one of two states that currently awards Electoral College votes to presidential candidates based on both who prevails statewide and how candidates fare in individual districts. Nebraska is the other.
But Nebraska Republicans have begun ramping up previously dormant efforts to switch to a strict winner-takes-all format, with surrogates from Donald Trump’s campaign pressuring holdout Republicans to vote for the measure.
Should they succeed, it would likely deprive Harris of a critical Electoral College vote from the Omaha district, which would close off one of her easiest maps to victory. With one electoral vote from Nebraska in her column, picking up just Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin while losing the rest of the swing states would be enough to get Harris to 270 electoral votes. Without that Omaha vote, that map would put the election in a 269-269 deadlock, leaving it to the House of Representatives to adjudicate. Since Republicans control more state delegations, that scenario would likely result in a Trump win.
Update on the fight over Nebraska's Dem-leaning electoral vote, and the GOP effort to go winner-take-all.
A key R in the Senate is a former Dem who wants to be mayor of Omaha – voting to help Trump here could tank that https://t.co/jLl2nOFKPF
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 19, 2024
Per NBC News:
Nearly every state allocates its electoral votes in the same straightforward way: The presidential ticket that wins the most votes gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The Electoral College can be complex, but this part of the process is simple: 48 states use a winner-take-all model.
There are two exceptions — Nebraska and Maine — that rely on a hybrid system. In the Cornhusker State, for example, which has five electoral votes, the candidate who wins Nebraska’s popular vote automatically gets two votes, while the other three go to the candidate who wins the popular vote in each of the state’s three congressional districts. Maine has four electoral votes, and it operates the same way.
In theory, with 46 days remaining in the 2024 election cycle, and early voting already underway in some areas, both states are locked into this same model in this year’s presidential race. In practice, quite a few Republicans apparently disagree.
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