by Jeff Childers
Newsweek ran a terrific, narrative-bending elections story yesterday headlined, “Nebraska Democrat switching to Republican is major victory for Trump.” This highly ironic state-level story is garnering national attention, and driving democrats even more insane, because due to a wild confluence of coincidences, it could change how the presidential race turns out.
But first, Trump had nothing to do with it. In a press conference announcing his swap, Nebraska State Senator Mike McDonnell explained he first joined the Democrat Party as a young man back in the 1990’s — but as a pro-life Catholic democrat. McDonnell said democrat officials in Nebraska gave him an ultimatum: unless he started voting pro-abortion, he cannot participate in the party, be a delegate, get on a committee, or have any meaningful future in the democrat party.
So what did you expect him to do? He switched parties and became a Republican.
McDonnell’s party swap is getting national attention because, believe it or not, it could affect the outcome of the Presidential election. One CNN commenter reporting on the story wordily noted, “The shift to a filibuster-proof Republican majority could pave the way for significant legislative changes in Nebraska, including the potential adoption of a winner-take-all electoral system with implications for national elections.”
It requires a little more explanation. During Presidential elections, 48 states allocate electoral college votes on a “winner-takes-all” basis. That’s how candidates “win states” on election night. For instance, Trump is expected to win Florida, and take all its 25 electoral college votes, even though he may not win every Florida county. But Nebraska has a different and nearly unique electoral college system, where its 6 electoral college votes are awarded piecemeal between the presidential candidates following a complicated allocation scheme. (Maine is the only other state to do this.)
The result of all this complicated individualism is nobody cares much about Nebraska. It could only possibly make an electoral difference in the extremely unlikely event the presidential race came down to razor-tight margins, which isn’t likely to ever happen for a lot of reasons.
But there’s a twist! A bill pending in Nebraska’s legislature, LB764, would transform Nebraska’s electoral college from a bizarre, Maine-like outlier into a regular “winner-takes-all” system. And — believe it or not — if that happens, some models predict that little Nebraska and its six electoral college votes could tilt the race safely in Trump’s favor.
So that’s what’s making national democrats madder than a swarm of disturbed honeybees over McDonnell’s treacherous party swap.
But there’s another highly ironic part of the story. For months, democrats have been salivating about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and tossed the abortion battle back to the states. Democrats cannot wait to run on the abortion issue, everywhere, all the time. But the abortion issue backfired in McDonnell’s case; democrats’ irrational insistence on making abortion their top, inflexible, unwavering issue drove McDonnell out of the democrat party and right into the welcoming arms of the Republicans at the exact best time.
And that one little change — directly caused by democrats’ stubborn intransigence on abortion — might make all the difference.
In another wild 2024 surprise, it no longer seems so much like revealed knowledge that the abortion issue must help the democrats in this election. Fascinating, as Spock would say.
Democrats take a totally irrational and unreasonable position on abortion because they want it to be an issue and they want to lie about it. They call them abortion bans, but nowhere is abortion banned, merely restricted and regulated; it HAS to be to avoid it turning into murder. But Democrats don’t care if it’s murder or not. They whine about Roe v Wade but they were disregarding that anyway; it restricted abortion to the first trimester, but the Democrats in many cases wanted abortion on demand up to the time of birth… or beyond. When you mention that, they say it doesn’t happen or it is extremely rare. Well, then, compromise and ban it; what do you have to lose? But they won’t because Democrats NEVER compromise, they dictate.
The Cornhuskers are leaving the Democrats with cobs without Corn the crows and people a re their fill and left