OMAHA \u2014 Bored by politics until two months ago, Coral Meija said two things got her involved in this year\u2019s election: Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s ascension to the top of the ticket and, more importantly, two abortion-related measures on Nebraska\u2019s November ballot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is definitely No. 1,\u201d said Meija, 23, gesturing to reveal that she is seven months pregnant, as she sat last Friday in a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town at a packed event for the local Democrat running for the U.S. House.<\/p>\n
Combine those two factors with Nebraska\u2019s quirky law giving Democrats a chance to nab one potentially game-changing electoral vote for president, as well as a crucial House race, and Omaha has turned into one of the most unlikely but hottest battlegrounds on the political map.<\/p>\n
Just twice since the law changed in 1992 has red Nebraska awarded one of its five electoral college votes to the Democratic presidential candidate, and both times it came from Nebraska\u2019s 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses Omaha. Now, after Harris\u2019s surge through the late summer, Democrats and Republicans alike see a chance for the Omaha area to vote for the Democratic candidate a third time \u2014 and maybe even swing the presidential election.<\/p>\n
Under that not-completely-crazy possibility, Harris and former president Donald Trump could end up dividing up states so evenly that the electoral count could end up at 269 for Harris, 268 for Trump.<\/p>\n
And then the final vote could be decided right here in Omaha.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we can be the tiebreaking vote for the presidency and people take it really seriously,\u201d said state Sen. Tony Vargas (D), who is challenging the district\u2019s four-term incumbent Rep. Don Bacon (R) in a race to help determine the House majority. \u201cThe energy is just incredible. And people take both these things very, very seriously, as a point of pride.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vargas was speaking Friday in his campaign headquarters, where he was mapping out ways in which his campaign and Harris\u2019s Nebraska team can help each other. The congressional race has always been expected to play a pivotal role with the House, and now, with the possibility the 2nd district might hand Harris an electoral college vote, the Harris-Walz campaign is flooding the TV airwaves here.<\/p>\n
Local Democrats have embraced \u201cblue-dot energy,\u201d planting simple white lawn signs with a blue circle to illustrate their liberal lean despite being surrounded by a deep-red, conservative area for hundreds of miles in any direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that Harris has blocked $6 million on TV, and she\u2019s spending it right now. We have zero on the other side. So what it does, it hurts our party in the Omaha area, up and down ballot,\u201d Bacon said Saturday during a rally at a local police hall.<\/p>\n
In fact, Bacon shortchanged the disparity. The Harris-Walz campaign is spending $6 million in ads in Omaha, according to AdImpact, an independent firm surveying political spending. But Biden had already spent about $4 million before he handed the reins to Harris, and liberal allies spent another $5 million.<\/p>\n
All told, it\u2019s about $15 million for the Democratic presidential ticket and less than $200,000 for the GOP nominee.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign has simply surrendered this district, despite winning it in 2016 and losing to Biden here by just 6 percent in 2020. The state legislature even redrew it to be a little less favorable for Democrats.<\/p>\n
Aside from a private fundraiser in late August attended by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump\u2019s running mate, the campaign has little presence in Omaha. His allies launched a ham-handed attempt to strong-arm state legislators into changing the law so that Trump could claim all five of Nebraska\u2019s electoral votes in the winner-take-all model used by 48 other states, but that failed. Under current law, the winner of the state\u2019s popular vote gets two electoral college votes, and its three congressional districts gets one vote each.<\/p>\n
With Harris going all in, Republicans fear that Bacon and other down-ballot Republicans could pay the price.<\/p>\n
By late June, Republicans in Washington had felt confident about Bacon\u2019s campaign, in part because Biden had sagged far enough that Trump had a pretty good chance at winning the district and its electoral vote.<\/p>\n
Now, Republicans and Democrats alike view Harris as the heavy favorite to come close to or even exceed Biden\u2019s margin of victory in the state\u2019s 2nd Congressional District.<\/p>\n
And that makes Bacon more endangered than he has ever been.<\/p>\n
\u201cI bet you it costs me 2 or 3 points every four years,\u201d he said of the Democratic effort to win the lone electoral vote. \u201cIt surely skews the spending in our district, which I obviously don\u2019t like. But if you\u2019re a Democrat, you love it.\u201d<\/p>\n
A retired Air Force brigadier general, Bacon, 61, is running as a mainstream conservative who is willing to break with his party, as a Republican who voted to certify Biden\u2019s 2020 victory and one of 13 House Republicans who supported the 2021 infrastructure law.<\/p>\n
Vargas, 40, an eight-year veteran of the legislature, served as a public school teacher and on the school board. He\u2019s running to the political middle as a tax-cutter who wants a safe and secure border, embracing his heritage as part of the American Dream to appeal to the district\u2019s moderate lean.<\/p>\n
Bacon narrowly survived in 2022 when, by Vargas\u2019s own admission, he ran an uneven campaign that raised too little money, ran too few negative contrast ads on Bacon\u2019s record and failed to galvanize enough support in Black and Latino neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did well and over-performed in places that we didn\u2019t expect to, but we really needed to make sure to do more to get more Democrats out to vote,\u201d Vargas, whose parents immigrated from Peru, said.<\/p>\n
Even though Vargas had a more professional campaign this time, that lack of voter enthusiasm persisted through most of the summer with Biden at the top of the ticket. \u201cThe party was sort of dead,\u201d said Josh Rodriguez, 23, who works in accounting for Union Pacific, joining Meija\u2019s table Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI accepted it,\u201d Rodriguez said of Trump. \u201cHe was gonna win.\u201d<\/p>\n
That changed when Biden dropped out and Harris took the mantle, placing a woman with a chance to make history at the top of the ticket as Vargas tries to become the state\u2019s first Latino member of Congress and abortion rights measures are on the ballot.<\/p>\n
Nationally, Harris raced back into a competitive posture and pretty soon political commentators started saying Harris merely needed to win the \u201cBlue Wall\u201d \u2014 Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin \u2014 to win the electoral college.<\/p>\n
But that was the 2020 version of a presidential victory map, when those three states added up to 44 electoral votes. Just winning those three and the other states that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had won added up to 271 votes back then.<\/p>\n
After the decennial census in 2021, Michigan and Pennsylvania lost a vote each, dropping the Blue Wall margin to exactly 269 votes. Now, if Trump were to win the southern battlegrounds of Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, the race could end up tied 269-269 if he won the Omaha district, and result in Congress deciding the presidency.<\/p>\n
If the Omaha district breaks for Harris, just as it did for Biden four years ago and Obama in 2008, she would win the presidency with 270. <\/p>\n
\u201cKamala Harris definitely, definitely helped out,\u201d Meija\u2019s cousin Jesus Ruiz Flores said of the local energy.<\/p>\n
Harris campaign officials privately feel strong about the race but take nothing for granted. When her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held a rally outside Omaha last month, he leaned into the idea that this district could be critical.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what I also know about this state? Nebraskans don\u2019t fear the future, you make the future,\u201d Walz, who was born and raised in rural Nebraska, told a crowd of several thousand.<\/p>\n
Officially, Trump maintains that he can win the district. \u201cI LOVE OMAHA, and won it in 2016,\u201d he wrote on social media after the effort to change the law failed. \u201cLooks like I\u2019ll have to do it again!!!\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s little visual sign of a real effort. Maybe Trump\u2019s advisers saw the writing on the wall, or the highway, a while ago and realized Omaha is not his type of town.<\/p>\n
A drive along West Dodge Road out of Omaha\u2019s downtown revealed several businesses with big signs promoting Bacon\u2019s reelection as well as those of Sens. Deb Fischer (R) and Pete Ricketts (R) \u2014 but not Trump.<\/p>\n
Nebraska presents as a deeply conservative state, having given Trump margins of almost 20 and 25 percentage points the past two elections. But voters have long favored conservatives who are temperamentally moderate in Congress, even as loud, far-right voices control state and county Republican committees. These leaders have issued symbolic penalties to Bacon and other Republicans for not being sufficiently supportive of Trump, infuriating mainstream GOP voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe state and county party have alienated a lot of Republicans because they are hard core, what I call FRITO\u2019s: Freaking Republicans in Trump only,\u201d Tim Heller, 60, a life insurance executive, said at the police hall while wearing a Bacon T-shirt.<\/p>\n
Depending on his mood, he might choose a different f-word to lead the FRITO\u2019s acronym. \u201cThey\u2019re focused on Trump and Trump alone and their tinfoil hat, election security issues,\u201d said Heller, who backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the GOP primary and will now support Trump.<\/p>\n
In its almost 10 years of existence, the House Freedom Caucus, an ideological wellspring of Trumpism, has never claimed a member from Nebraska among its ranks. And Ricketts and Fischer, who faces a surprisingly strong challenge from an independent, are reliably quiet allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s political nature is a fountain of reformist ideas from both parties. In the early 1890s, William Jennings Bryan represented eastern Nebraska in the House for two terms, served as columnist for the Omaha World-Herald and then became a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, running on populist agrarian ideas.<\/p>\n
And in 1934, Republican U.S. Sen. George Norris led the way to getting Nebraska to turn into a unicameral legislature, just a Senate, and a nonpartisan setup that has none of the usual party leadership structure that can whip up support for the governor or any leader. It takes a two-thirds supermajority of 33 votes to clear a filibuster in the 49-senator body.<\/p>\n
Is there anyone cracking the whip and instilling discipline? \u201cNo, there\u2019s not. It is a very foreign concept,\u201d said state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D), a third-generation politician in Omaha.<\/p>\n
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) learned this lesson the hard way last week when he parachuted into Lincoln, the state capital, to rally together a bunch of GOP state senators to try to convince them to change the law and award all five electoral votes to Trump, presuming he wins statewide again.<\/p>\n
As Graham admitted Monday, after his bid fell apart, no one seemed capable of ordering these state senators to fall in line.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was interesting. They have a different system. Everybody\u2019s like a mini-governor,\u201d Graham told reporters back in the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n
Bacon and Vargas are both now trying to position themselves as the sensible moderate while attacking the other as an ideological extremist. Bacon brings up Vargas\u2019s past support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), while Vargas hammers Bacon for embracing Trump\u2019s recent endorsement.<\/p>\n
The blue-dot energy clearly handed momentum to Vargas, whose road to Washington might be driven through that lone electoral vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do things differently in Nebraska,\u201d Vargas said. \u201cNebraska is different and it\u2019s okay that we\u2019re different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
OMAHA \u2014 Bored by politics until two months ago, Coral Meija said two things got her involved in this year\u2019s election: Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s ascension to the top of the ticket and, more importantly, two abortion-related measures on Nebraska\u2019s November ballot. \u201cThat is definitely No. 1,\u201d said Meija, 23, gesturing to reveal that she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10168,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}