Nebraska and Maine’s 2nd District Explained

If you’ve looked at any electoral map prediction, you may have noticed that Maine and Nebraska are slightly different in the way that they assign electoral votes to presidential candidates. Rather than assigning all of that state’s electors to the overall statewide winner, the two states assign two votes for the at-large winner and one each for each of their congressional districts (three in Neb. and two in Maine). Coincidentally, in both of these states, the second district is competitive. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at these districts.

Maine has divvied up their electoral votes in this fashion since 1972, and Nebraska has done it since 1992. Especially with Nebraska, a solid-red state, this was done to get candidates interested in the state, as some districts are competitive. Other states, like California, have tried to get similar proposals implemented, but due to partisanship, no other state has followed through with the Maine-Nebraska method. (An analysis found that such a system favors Republicans more than Democrats, as extremely liberal cities are often packed into one district.) Though these competitive districts are worth just one electoral vote, in the event that there is a very, very close election, the way that these districts vote could end up breaking the election. (If you didn’t think small states could make or break an election, just remember, if Al Gore won New Hampshire’s four electoral votes in 2000, he would’ve won the election even without Florida. Gore lost N.H. by just 7,000 votes.)

We’ll start off this analysis by looking at Maine first before moving on to Nebraska.

In Maine, the first congressional district covers the cities of Augusta, Auburn, and Portland and is safely Democratic, and is entirely out of the question for Republicans: Biden leads by 24.7 percentage points here. The second district covers the entire state north of Augusta and Portland and is way more rural than the first. This is the only competitive area in the Pine Tree State, as the statewide vote always goes to Democrats, too. Biden leads by almost 15 percent in polls of Maine at-large.

Because the race isn’t competitive in either Maine’s first district or Maine at-large, we’ll focus on the second district. In 2016, Maine split its vote for the first time since 1828 as Donald Trump managed to win this district by over 10 percent, a massive 18-point shift in favor of the Republicans.

This has led to lots of people expecting Trump to win this district this year due to the district seeing such a large shift in favor of Trump. However, the data seems to somewhat disagree.

For example, in the 2018 midterm election cycle, three-term incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin was defeated in part thanks to Maine trialing ranked-choice voting for the first time here. The way it works is that if, in the first round of voting, no candidate receives a majority of the vote-share, losing independent candidates get their votes redistributed to their second-choice candidates. It happened that most independent voters put Democrat Jared Golden as their second choice, so in round two, after the votes were redistributed, Golden edged out a narrow victory. (Without ranked-choice, the independents would have been Democratic spoilers, leading to Poliquin being reelected.)

In polls, Biden has leads by 2.5 percent on the FiveThirtyEight polling average. Though there were two outlier polls by Critical Insights (C/D rated pollster) showing Trump up by eight percent, the rest of the polls all show Biden leading.

As shown in the list of recent polls below, the two highly-rated pollsters show Biden ahead, though narrowly.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast shows this race as a pure tossup, with Biden having a 52 percent chance of winning. The forecast has been quite back-and-forth lately with Trump and Biden neck-and-neck.

The outcome of this race will show just how much support the GOP has lost in rural America. This will be quite an important race to watch on election night.

Let’s now move on to Nebraska’s second district.

The first congressional district includes the suburbs of Omaha, the state’s largest city, as well as the state’s capital Lincoln. Roughly 65 percent of this district is urban. The second district encompasses downtown Omaha (Douglas and Sarpy counties) and is the most liberal district in the state. The third district includes everything west of Madison County and is the most rural county.

The third district is the most conservative voting bloc in the Electoral College, having an R+27 partisan lean and expected on FiveThirtyEight to go to Trump by a 47-point margin. The first district, though not safe for the Republicans, is considered likely for Trump based on expected voting margins, and is not competitive whatsoever either for the Democrats. Though Lancaster County (Lincoln) generally votes Democrat, that is not enough to offset Republicans’ wins in other counties in this district. Because of these two districts’ Republican lean, the at-large vote is also considered safe for the Republicans. As such, we’ll be focusing on the second district, the only swing district in the Cornhusker State.

The only time the second district ever split its vote was for Barack Obama in 2008, when he won it by a narrow 1.22 percent margin. In both 2012 and 2016, a Republican won it by seven and two percent respectively.

However, it seems as though the district may once again flip this year. As this district is one of the most well-educated in the country as well as being much more urban than the rest of the state, it seems as though many voters are choosing not to vote for Trump.

Though polling has been sparse in the district, with most polls being partisan internals, there is one poll that gives us a better picture of the race in this state: a Siena College/The New York Times poll (A+ rated), the only nonpartisan poll of the district so far, shows Biden leading seven points. Seven points. That is more than in Arizona, Florida, and a number of other lean Democratic swing states. The polling average is 7.6 percent on FiveThirtyEight.

This has led to FiveThirtyEight giving Joe Biden a whopping 78 percent chance on their forecast, higher than states like Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. That is about as likely as the chance Trump has to win Alaska.

All in all, Biden is poised to win both competitive congressional districts which get Electoral College representation, which could prove decisive in the event of a close election, like in the map below.

In order to avoid this type of nightmare almost-tie scenario from happening (which will almost certainly guarantee a drawn-out legal battle), you must make sure you vote. Early in-person and absentee voting has begun in most states, so check with your county’s election website. Click here to find out more about voting.

Based on the U.S. Elections Project, as of writing, 57.4 million Americans have cast their ballots already.

More analyses on competitive races and states will come soon. I plan to cover Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Alabama, Alaska, and Maine’s U.S. Senate races prior to Election Day. Make sure to stay tuned for those posts and subscribe. In the meantime, check out the other analyses in this series: Arizona, Montana, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Kansas.

Check out our 2020 election coverage page for more on the election!