Newly minted Donald Trump surrogates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, might be on the Hilton in downtown Omaha, Nebraska on Saturday within the duo’s newest marketing campaign cease for the Republican presidential nominee. Only a quick 25-minute drive away, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz may even be vying for Omahans’ votes, internet hosting a rally at SumTur Amphitheater in Papillion.
With simply over two weeks till Election Day, the 2 camps are combating for a small and politically distinctive slice of the Cornhusker State’s japanese border. Nebraska is one in every of two states, the opposite being Maine, that doesn’t do a winner-takes-all system with their electoral school votes. The realm round Omaha, the state’s second congressional district, holds one electoral vote—and this election, in keeping with an analysis by NBC Information Nationwide Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki, that one vote might resolve the race.
“It’s particularly necessary for democrats,” Kornaki started, “there’s an electoral map situation for Kamala Harris that completely hinges on locking it down.” That situation appears like this: Harris takes dwelling Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; Trump wins North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada; Omaha, on this hypothetical, might get Harris to 270.
Since 1992, when Nebraska switched its electoral course of to the one it has now, the district has gone blue twice—as soon as in 2008 for Barack Obama and once more for Joe Biden within the 2020 election. To indicate their help for the Harris-Walz ticket, native Omaha residents have put up marketing campaign indicators of their yards featuring a single blue dot.
In September, Republicans throughout the nation, together with Trump himself, tried to intervene in Nebraska’s electoral school system, executing a last-ditch and ultimately unsuccessful lobbying marketing campaign to overturn the decades-old regulation and lump collectively all the districts within the state. The Harris marketing campaign has exponentially outspent Trump in Nebraska, dedicating $5 million towards promoting within the state, in comparison with Trump’s $200,000, in keeping with reporting from NPR based mostly on knowledge from ad-tracking agency AdImpact.
Nonetheless, the Trump marketing campaign’s option to ship RFK Jr. and Gabbard to Omaha factors to a continued effort to show the entire state purple.
Kennedy—who as soon as referred to Trump as a “horrible president” and a “bully”—and Gabbard—who opted for critiques like “corrupt” and “unfit to serve” in 2020—have each taken on distinguished roles within the effort to elect the previous president. Since ending his personal bid for workplace in August, he’s been stumping for Trump. Although Kennedy—whose marketing campaign included a sexual assault allegation first reported by Self-importance Honest—paused his extra forward-facing campaigning after news broke that he allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with New York journal’s Washington, DC, correspondent Olivia Nuzzi.
