Former President Donald Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen called on state lawmakers Tuesday to pass legislation that would terminate the state's system for presidential elections that allowed Joe Biden and Barack Obama to each pick up a single electoral vote in the state in 2020 and 2008, respectively.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Pillen called on fellow Republicans in Nebraska's formally nonpartisan, single-house Legislature to rally around LB764, which would replace the state's unique presidential election system with the winner-take-all system used in 48 states.
In his own statement hours later posted to Truth Social, the social media app he founded after he was banned from others, Trump thanked Pillen for his "bold leadership" and urged Nebraskans to ask their lawmakers to support the proposal.
"Let's hope the Senate does the right thing," Trump wrote, referring to the Legislature.
Both men urged lawmakers to send the bill, , to his desk for signing — a feat that even Lippincott acknowledged will not be possible this year.
Tuesday marked Day 53 of this year's 60-day legislative session and Lippincott's proposal — which failed to advance last year from the Legislature's conservative-stacked Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee — does not have a path to Pillen's desk as the session's clock winds down.
"In essence, for right now, it's probably stalled in committee," Lippincott told the Journal Star. "I don't like to report that, but that's the facts."
Sens. John Arch of La Vista, the speaker of the Legislature, and Tom Brewer of Gordon, the committee's chairman, also said Tuesday that Pillen's request cannot be fulfilled with so few days left in this year's legislative session.
"I don't see a path to do that," Arch said.
Trump and Pillen's calls to action came fewer than five hours after Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and radio show host who founded Turning Point USA, highlighting a potential scenario in which Nebraska's decades-old election system could cost Trump the presidency in November.
"Thanks to this system, Omaha's electoral vote leans blue: Obama won it in 2008, and Biden won it in 2020. He's likely to win it again this year," Kirk wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, where he has amassed nearly 3 million followers.
"California would never do this. New York would never do this. And as long as that's the case, neither should we," wrote Kirk, who lives in Arizona. "This is completely fixable."
Kirk pointed to Lippincott's bill and told readers to call elected officials in Nebraska to urge them to support LB764, including Pillen's office's phone number in the post that had garnered 1 million views by 6 p.m. Tuesday and had gained traction among Nebraska conservative groups online, including the Nebraska Freedom Coalition.
Suppose Donald Trump flips Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada next fall, as current polls all show him doing. Would he win the presidency? Not quite. In fact, if Trump flips those three states and no others, he loses by exactly ONE electoral vote.
Why? Nebraska.
Despite being one of…
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11)
By 8 p.m. Tuesday, Trump himself had weighed in on the matter, pushing the proposal and praising Pillen as "a very smart and popular Governor, who has done some really great things."
But the state lawmakers facing calls to pass the bill offered different reactions than the former president.
"This blindsided me just before lunch today," said Brewer, a conservative who leads the committee where LB764 remains trapped and who said he hadn't heard from Pillen prior to his statement Tuesday — though his phone "exploded with emails" in the wake of Kirk's tweet.
"Just people being cranky about it," Brewer said. "And I'm like, 'Well, you should have been cranky about it a long time ago.'"
Brewer's committee , the latest in a series of conservative-backed bills seeking to eliminate Nebraska's presidential election system, which state lawmakers established in 1991.
Under the quirky system, which is also used in Maine, two of Nebraska's five electoral votes are awarded to the presidential ticket that wins the most votes statewide while the other three go to the winner of each of the state’s three congressional districts.
Lawmakers have tried to undo the system repeatedly in the decades since the Legislature established it, twice sending repeal bills to former Gov. Ben Nelson's desk in the 1990s, but the Democrat vetoed the legislation both times.
Since then, similar legislation has reached the floor of the Legislature six times — escaping the committee where Lippincott's version of the bill stalled — but none of those proposals have made it to the governor's desk.
Nebraska's election system survived a close call in 2016, when a proposal (LB10) to return the state to a winner-take-all system fell one vote short of overcoming a filibuster. Trump won all five of the state's electoral votes eight months later.
"This particular issue has been debated over and over and over again in the Nebraska Legislature, and time after time, the Nebraska Legislature has protected our unique approach to splitting our electoral votes," Sen. Danielle Conrad of ´óÄ̸£Àû¼§, a civil rights attorney who sits on the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, said Tuesday.
"It's not like it's an automatic division to any particular candidate or party." Conrad added. "(The current system) encourages competition. And it's up to each campaign to not take voters for granted and to make their cases to voters in those districts — which is exactly what should happen."
There is not enough time left in the legislation session for Lippincott's bill to follow the traditional route through the three rounds of debate proposals must advance through to be made law in Nebraska.
Even if the committee voted to advance Lippincott's bill to the floor of the Legislature, there were 230 other bills already waiting for first-round consideration Tuesday morning, many of which won't be taken up this year due to the session's short runway.
"It's just all about timing and management when it comes to getting bills successfully through the unicameral," Brewer said. "And it's past the 11th hour with this. We just don't have a way of making it fit."
And while the bill could, in theory, be added onto another elections-related bill with the support of 25 lawmakers, such a move would inevitably prompt a filibuster, which requires 33 votes to overcome.
"I have personally checked the body for 33 votes," Lippincott said. "Don't have 33 votes."
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (center) is joined by state senators at a press conference in February. The governor on Tuesday called for state lawmakers to replace Nebraska's unique presidential election system with a winner-take-all model after the idea was embraced by a popular right-wing radio host.