Pillen staffer confirms Charlie Kirk’s talk of Nebraska winner-take-all special session

OMAHA, Neb. (Nebraska Examiner) - Gov. Jim Pillen will call a special session this year if legislative leaders say they have the votes to award all five of Nebraska’s Electoral College votes to the statewide winner of the presidential popular vote, a staffer confirmed Tuesday.

Like Speaker of the Legislature John Arch late last week, Pillen confirmed Tuesday night through a spokeswoman that there is too little time left in the current legislative session to shift the state to winner-take-all now.

But Pillen publicly embraced a possible special session after comments by national talk show host and populist pundit Charlie Kirk, who worked with the Nebraska Republican Party to hold a political rally in Omaha on Tuesday with more than 700 conservatives. Organizers said more sat in spillover seating.

“The Governor looks forward to partnering with legislative leaders to move winner-take-all forward in a special session when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it,” Pillen spokeswoman Laura Strimple said. “Gov. Pillen is an enthusiastic supporter of winner-take-all, has been from the start, and will sign it into law the moment the Legislature puts it on his desk.”

Strimple’s comments largely mirrored details Kirk shared with his overflow audience at Lord of Hosts Church. Kirk said the Governor’s Office committed to a special session. Pillen’s statement left the same hedge room that has haunted his predecessors, the idea that even with a 33-vote majority in the 49-member Legislature, the GOP has lacked the votes for change.

Pressure for change

Kirk called for every attendee and every Republican in Nebraska who supports former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden to respectfully call and write to their state senators and let them know they want change.

“You have to just keep the pressure on the Legislature…,” Kirk said. “Once we get this taken care of in Nebraska, we have a much easier path to the presidency.”

Republican operatives circulating Tuesday at the Kirk rally seemed smitten with the idea that they might have an easier path to passage than securing the 33 votes needed to beat a pledged Democratic filibuster in the officially nonpartisan Legislature.

The plan being discussed would seek to suspend the Legislature’s rules that allow for a minority-led filibuster. It takes 30 votes to suspend legislative rules. Doing so would mean winner-take-all could pass with 25 votes and Pillen’s signature.

Pillen has also discussed calling senators back to Lincoln to pass property tax relief if they cannot coalesce around a package of tax shift proposals he supported. He told a reporter last week he’d keep lawmakers in session until December if needed.

Pillen allies have talked about the possibility that he might call a special session on more than one topic, but doing so might complicate the rules change by perhaps lowering the threshold needed for property tax bills, too.

Republicans in the Legislature are divided over the tax plan, with some calling for harder caps on spending by school districts and local governments. Others oppose increasing sales taxes or other taxes to offset property taxes.

So the question comes down to votes, and at last count, under peak pressure, legislative conservatives pushing for winner-take-all counted no more than 31 votes and at times as few as 29, depending on the timing of the proposed change.

At least a handful of GOP senators have privately told colleagues they would prefer not to make the change in an election year. That’s where Kirk said senators are misreading their voters and why he said he came to Omaha.

“I call this the Lazarus moment,” Kirk said. “We’re going to bring this back from the dead.”

Kirk, state GOP pressed for change

Kirk brought his conservative road show to Omaha on Tuesday after spending a week on his radio show, podcast and social media accounts pressing Nebraska to change how the state awards its Electoral College votes in presidential races.

The firebrand, known for targeting young conservatives with Turning Point USA, spent days telling his listeners to call and write Pillen and state lawmakers and urge them to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state in presidential elections this session.

He shifted tactics this week and demanded instead that the Legislature advance State Sen. Loren Lippincott’s Legislative Bill 764 this summer and make GOP-led Nebraska more like 48 other states in handing electoral votes to the statewide winner.

Nebraska, like Maine, awards a separate vote to the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts and two votes to the statewide winner.

Kirk called it “the goofiest thing I have ever seen.”

Democrats say Republicans scared

Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb and senators who defend the current system argue that awarding electoral votes by district better reflects the diversity of Nebraska’s voters.

“Kirk and Trump are desperate because they know their type of extreme politics is not popular in the 2nd Congressional District,” Kleeb said. “They know they can’t win the votes so they are trying to change the rules. Nebraskans support our fair electoral vote system and don’t need shock jocks telling us how to govern.”

Both parties are really fighting over one vote. The Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District voted for former President Barack Obama in 2008 and for Biden in 2020. The district backed Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

National pundits like Kirk have seized on the latest wave of polling that once again suggests that the presidential election could be swayed by a single electoral vote. Kirk shared a scenario where Biden beats Trump 270-268 if Omaha stays blue.

“In 2020, the one electoral vote was important, but it was not decisive,” he said. “This right here is the whole ball game. What you’re talking about is Nebraska could pick a president.”

Finding a way

Other Republicans who spoke, including Nebraska Republican Party chairman Eric Underwood, stressed how close active GOP members were to persuading the Legislature to make the change. He said the GOP would “find a way to get it done.”

Underwood was part of a group of Trump populists and disaffected former traditional Republicans who took over the Nebraska GOP from a group more loyal to former Gov. Pete Ricketts, whom Pillen appointed last year to the U.S. Senate.

Underwood made plain the group’s goal: “When we pass that one more electoral vote … we’re going to elect Donald J. Trump to be the next president of the United States.”

The gathering had the usual Kirk rally trappings, from the opening prayer to the pledge of allegiance and call and responses from an anti-Biden crowd against “Sleepy Joe.”

Nebraska’s national GOP committeewoman, Fanchon Blythe, a key organizer in the populist takeover of state and county GOPs, said Republicans had to stop worrying about playing by the rules and start doing what she said Democrats would do and act.

She said Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic, which she called a “scamdemic.” (The virus killed millions nationally and nearly 5,000 in Nebraska.) She said they did so by amplifying pushes for voting by mail in many states. She said Republicans should push just as hard for winner-take all.

“The question we must ask ourselves is, how bad do Republicans want to win?” Blythe said.

William Feely, the Nebraska GOP’s legislative director and vice chairman of the GOP’s 3rd District caucus, said the party has long supported moving back to winner-take-all from the current system, which has been in place since 1991.

“This electoral allocation is already in 48 other states,” Feely said, “so why not make it 49?”

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

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