Pres-by-LD: Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation comes to Nebraska, home of America's only officially non-partisan and unicameral legislature. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new states; you can also find all our data from 2016 and past cycles here.
As many quiz show contestants have learned the hard way for decades, the Nebraska state legislature is quite different than all the other's. There's only one chamber, and all senators are elected in non-partisan races. Nebraska has been this way since the Great Depression when progressive U.S. Sen. George Norris, who himself later left the GOP to become an independent, pushed for it in his home state, arguing that bicameral legislatures and partisanship only caused problems.
However, most of Nebraska's 49 senators do identify with a party. Altogether, there are 31 Republicans (this includes one open seat, where GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts will presumably pick a Republican replacement), 15 Democrats, one Libertarian, and two members who do not align with any party. Half the Senate is up every cycle.
Donald Trump carried Nebraska 60-34, a small swing to the right from Mitt Romney's 60-38 win. Trump carried 37 of the 49 seats, losing two Romney districts. Five Democrats, Libertarian state Sen. Laura Ebke, and Bob Krist, a former Republican who recently became an independent and announced that he would challenge Ricketts next year, sit in Trump seats. Joni Craighead, the one Republican to win a Clinton district, recently resigned from the chamber, and her seat is currently vacant. Additionally, independent Ernie Chambers holds what is by far the bluest seat in the state.
We'll start with a look at those Democrats on Trump turf. The reddest seat is LD-15. This seat went from 60-38 Romney to 65-30 Trump, but Lynne Walz narrowly unseated incumbent David Schnoor, a Republican, 51-49 last year. All the other four Democrats in Trump seats also hold districts he carried by double digits. On fact, Trump's smallest win in one of these seats was a 55-37 victory in LD-45 in suburban Omaha's Sarpy County. Last year, Democrat Sue Crawford won her second term 57-43.
Ebke, the one Libertarian, holds a seat located outside Omaha that backed Trump 67-27. Ebke ran as a Republican in 2014 and narrowly beat another GOP candidate in the general, but she switched parties in 2016, citing her frustration with Ricketts. Krist, one of the chamber's two independents, holds an Omaha-area seat that backed Trump just 50-44, and he will not be up again until 2018. The one GOP-held Clinton seat, which is also in the Omaha area, went from 55-44 Romney to 49-46 Clinton, and it will be up next in 2018.
Chambers, the Senate's other independent, holds an Omaha seat that backed Clinton 86-11, a drop from Obama's 91-8 win here. Chambers was first elected in 1970 and served until term-limits forced him out in 2008. In 2012, Chambers challenged his Democratic successor and beat her 67-33. Chambers has a history of taking up unpopular causes in this conservative state, with him recently introducing a resolution to call for Trump to be expelled from office.
Chambers has also not been afraid to speak his mind. Chambers, who is black, has said that "[w]hite people, they don’t have a high opinion of me. They thought I was uppity and arrogant – they didn’t like my attitude." Still, Chambers has managed to win over some of his conservative colleagues. Chambers has made abolishing the death penalty his top priorities, and he temporarily succeeded in 2015, when the legislature overrode Ricketts' veto and outlawed capitol punishment. However, voters passed a ballot measure the next year 61-39 to reinstate it.
While the Nebraska legislature is unique in the United States, it's not so different when it comes to redistricting. In 2011, the GOP-dominated chamber drew up new lines, and they were signed by GOP Gov. Dave Heineman.
To get a sense for how much this map favors the GOP, we've sorted every district in a legislative chamber from Hillary Clinton's greatest margin of victory to Trump's biggest edge, and taken a look at the seat in the middle. This median seat backed Trump 61-34, just a little to the right of his 60-34 statewide win. We've published a spreadsheet to keep track of each chamber's median seat, and we'll be updating it as we roll out new states.