Squeezing Edges
Squeezing Edges
Nebraska Tiebreakers. Two Tweets and a Lie. The inches are all around us.
When you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. The margin for error is so small. On this team, we fight for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s going to make the difference between winning and losing.
That was Al Pacino’s locker room speech in the football movie Any Given Sunday. But it is also a good way to look at this election and the motley crew trying to build the biggest tent possible to win in November. To gain every possible edges.
Team Normal works to gain those edges to empower the center, from securing endorsements from Trump-skeptical Republicans to John Avlon running on a Common Sense ballot line in NY-01 to an Independent Senate candidate in Nebraska. While too often the extremes in the party seek to squeeze people out of the tent who don’t pass all the purity tests.
Nebraska Tiebreakers
Of all the things wrong with the Electoral College, the most obvious is that there’s an even number of electors. A 269-269 outcome is plausible given current swing states, which would effectively give Trump the win due to how Congress decides a tie.1
Republicans have been looking for an edge and thought they had one in Nebraska, which allocates electoral votes by congressional district. Most of the time, that means Democrats win a single vote in its 2nd congressional district. But Trump and Nebraska Republicans worked to switch to a winner take all model. That one vote may not seem like a big deal, but it could matter a lot in a very plausible scenario: if Kamala wins Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but loses the other swing states, Nebraska’s single congressional district vote will be decisive.
Spoiler alert: as of yesterday afternoon, it’s not happening. And we have two Team Normal legislators to thank.
First up is state Senator Mike McDonnell, the swing vote in the state senate who decided to keep the system as it is. Last year, the decision would have been easy for McDonnell. A lifelong labor Democrat, he would have quickly voted to keep the current system.
But McDonnell isn’t a Democrat anymore. McDonnell didn’t choose to leave the party, he was forced out by progressives. A college-town legislator sponsored the resolution to object to Democrats voting their conscience on social issues.
This isn’t the first time Nebraska leftists have put purity ahead of winning. As we broke down in The Other Eastman Memo, far-left candidate Kara Eastman ran a “Brooklyn-style campaign” against moderate Republican Don Bacon in that same congressional district where Democrats get the electoral college vote. As usually happens when an extremist runs against a moderate, she lost both times.
There is more to the story. McDonnell is only in the position to save the system because of another pragmatist: state Senator Lynne Walz.
Rather than taking the Kara Eastman route to defeat, Senator Lynne Walz is a centrist Democrat who represents a district that Trump won by 33 points (the same margin as Oklahoma and North Dakota). Walz is a conservative Democrat who both runs and legislates differently, which is why she is able to keep getting elected.
Team Normal gaining an edge looks like this Walz winning red voters, keeping McDonnell in the tent, and rejecting extreme candidates like Eastman. Because you never know when you’ll need a big tent.
Two Tweets and a Lie
The vast majority of Americans disagree with both presidential nominees on at least one major issue.
Some people deal with that cognitive dissonance better than others, something that both Never Trumpers and leftists exemplified this week. Here are two tweets that demonstrate ways of dealing with having impact in a complicated world:
#1:
Nikki Haley’s Campaign Co-Chair in Iowa, a lifelong Republican, just endorsed Harris for President, and published a lengthy op-ed in USA Today explaining why she’s crossing party lines. In the piece, Dawn Roberts praises Harris for inviting Republicans to speak at her convention, for considering adding a Republican to her Cabinet, and for vowing to be a President for “all Americans.” She then closed by saying: “Kamala Harris is the person to lead our country into the future.”
Organizations like
and Haley Voters For Harris, and Never Trump leaders like have gracefully communicated how and why they overcome differences with Kamala to recommend taking action.Now on to #2 … how does the Gaza-focused “Uncommitted” organization deal with this complexity? More complexity.
It’s a good reminder of something that has been a consistent theme: the center-right is often a better ally in the fight for democracy than the litmus test left. The primaries showed that Haley voters, not Uncommitted voters, are the path to 50+1. It’s simple math.
Center-right politicians like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have recognized the threat to democracy that Trump posed and have endorsed the only candidate that can stop him: Kamala Harris.
On the other hand, Sunrise, Uncommitted, and Rashida Tlaib have all refused to endorse Kamala Harris. Sunrise said that Biden supports “genocide” while refusing to endorse him - while simultaneously taking credit for his climate actions.
Meanwhile, the center-right policymakers endorsing Harris demand nothing in return except that she continue to preserve and defend American democracy.
Pandering to the far-left doesn’t work. They demand unpopular policies on the border, education, and energy that play terribly in swing districts - and they don’t even endorse when they get their way. Instead, Democrats can win over Haley voters, who have similar issue preferences to the moderate voters who swing elections.
Which brings us to the lie.
Swing Voter Denial
In The New Yorker this week, Jay Caspian Kang proclaimed “The Unknowability of the Undecided Voter.” He claims that “after nearly a decade of inquiry into these undecided voters … we still don’t really know who these people are, despite the fact that we, as the press, have seemingly interviewed every single one of them, sometimes more than once.”
Kang makes two mistakes.
First, he undercounts the share of persuadable voters. As we have covered, volatility in the electorate is badly underrated. A fact reinforced last week by the highly rated Monmouth poll showing just 73% of voters are “Definitely” voting for either Trump or Harris.
Second, political science consistently demonstrates moderate candidates do better. There may not be a uniform ideological profile of a persuadable voter, but the direction is clear. And leading outlets muddying the waters (without citing evidence from political scientists or polling or elsewhere) ain’t great.
Swing voters may not be uniform, but they are knowable. Recently released Blueprint polling shows they are “ideologically eclectic,” holding conservatives views on immigration and crime but progressive views on abortion. They are deficit hawks concerned about prices. The pollster notes they “reward pragmatic populist positions rather than strict ideological consistency.”
These knowable edges are available to Team Normal, from Nebraska centrists to political science research to Haley voters.
The edges aren’t always obvious, but they make the difference. As Pacino closes, That’s a team … That’s all it is. Now, what are you going to do?
You can start by supporting the Team Normal candidates who are picking up extra inches to flip the House.
In the case of an Electoral College tie, the state delegates in the House of Representatives votes (so all of California’s delegation has the same power as North Dakota’s). Even if Democrats win the House, there’s basically no chance they’d win 26 state delegations.