Barack Obama may have made a little more history Friday, apparently banking a presidential electoral vote in Nebraska and running up his score.
DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, November 6, 2008 6:00 pm
Barack Obama may have made a little more history Friday, apparently banking a presidential electoral vote in Nebraska and running up his score.
With the early vote count completed in Douglas County, Obama grabbed a 1,260-vote lead over John McCain in the 2nd Congressional District and his supporters laid claim to one of the state’s five electoral votes.
“Today, Nebraska’s 2nd District voters added an Obamaha-shaped exclamation point to Barack Obama’s historic election,” Sen. Ben Nelson said.
“It really is a new day in America when he even picks up an electoral vote in Nebraska.”
But the results remained unofficial Friday, with almost 5,300 provisional ballots in Douglas County to be considered next week.
But those ballots, some of which will be ruled invalid, are not expected to vary much from other Douglas County results favoring Obama.
An Obama victory would rack up the first Democratic electoral vote in red-state Nebraska since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson captured the state.
And it would bump Obama’s electoral vote count to 365, far above the 270 required to win the presidency.
The metropolitan Omaha district is composed of Douglas County and portions of Sarpy County.
Here’s Friday’s unofficial 2nd District count:
Obama, 134,168.
McCain, 132,908.
McCain had led Obama by 569 votes Wednesday. But the additional count of early ballots in Douglas County added these figures to the results:
Obama, 8,434.
McCain, 6,605.
Sarpy County totals already had been completed.
The Obama campaign mounted an unprecedented field operation in Omaha, registering new voters and prompting a record outpouring of early voters.
Nebraska awards one of its five electoral votes to the winner of each of its three congressional districts. The other two votes go to the statewide victor.
It was that split-vote system that generated an exciting presidential race in the 2nd District this year, Nelson said.
“It shouldn’t be tampered with by those with partisan motives,” he said.
Republican leaders have signaled their intention to attempt to repeal the district-vote allocation in the 2009 Legislature, returning to a winner-take-all system of awarding all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner.
Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.