Nati Harnik/AP Photo
Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers addresses lawmakers in Lincoln, Nebraska, February 12, 2020.
As unlikely as it may seem, Nebraska may have clinched Joe Biden’s presidential victory and steered the country away from Electoral College gridlock. Nebraska, like Maine, has a unique electoral system wherein the votes are split up according to congressional districts. Historically, Nebraska is a deep-red state with reliable blue enclaves in Omaha and Lincoln, the state’s two urban centers, but, as of Wednesday morning, Biden had won Nebraska’s Second Congressional District by more than six percentage points.
If Biden falls short in the states where he’s trailing right now, but holds onto Nevada and Arizona, he will have 270 electoral votes in his corner—the bare minimum required to win the presidency. That would mean that the single electoral vote in NE-02 would provide the margin of victory, avoiding a 269-269 tie that would throw the election to the House of Representatives (where because of the peculiar rules for resolving such ties, Trump would likely be chosen president even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats).
It’s only the second time Nebraska’s electoral districts haven’t gone fully to the statewide popular-vote winner. In 2008, Barack Obama poached the Second Congressional District, which encompasses Omaha, surrounding suburbs, and a few farms, by 3,325 votes, a margin of just 1.2 percent. In 2016, Donald Trump carried the state by 25 points, but only ousted Clinton in the district by 2 percent. Even this year, while Biden took NE-02 comfortably, the same voters advanced Rep. Don Bacon, the Republican incumbent, over progressive Kara Eastman.
“Nebraskans are pretty independent,” said Paul Hammel, who reports on Nebraska state politics for the Omaha World-Herald. “There’s a fair number of both Democrats and Republicans who just vote for the right person. It isn’t a straight R and D vote.”
Though there was a confluence of forces that led to Biden’s victory in the district, it would be a mistake to overlook one of its homegrown heroes, Ernie Chambers. A giant in Nebraska politics, Chambers is Nebraska’s longest-serving state senator, and just this year completed what could be his final term in office after 46 years of service. Immediately recognizable by his casual dress of short-sleeve sweatshirts and blue jeans, Chambers is so popular in his district that he didn’t even have to campaign and was still re-elected 11 times.
A self-proclaimed “defender of the downtrodden,” Chambers got his political start as a civil rights leader in the 1960s and, throughout his remarkable legislative career, fostered progressive politics in a deep-red state and fought for the integrity of equal and fair representation. That includes the system for distributing electoral votes, which Chambers went to extraordinary lengths to maintain.
Nebraska established its policy of splitting electoral votes over a winner-take-all system in 1991, much to the ire of Republicans who would otherwise carry the electoral votes entirely (1964 was the last time Nebraska voted Democratic as a state in a presidential election). Since then, Republicans have tried repeatedly to change this policy, especially after Obama carried the district in 2008. They came close in 2016 when Sen. Beau McCoy introduced a bill to restore a winner-take-all system. “McCoy was an outright racist,” Chambers told me in a phone conversation. “[He] wanted to ensure that wouldn’t happen again.”
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Chambers countered the winner-take-all proposal by filing an amendment to instead introduce a districts-take-all plan, which would have split up Nebraska into five “presidential elector” districts and have the winner of each issue one electoral vote, eliminating any award to the statewide winner. “There should be an opportunity for all citizens to cast a vote in presidential elections that would be more than merely pro forma,” Chambers said at the time. Proponents of splitting the vote argue such a policy aligns well with Nebraska’s independent political ethos, as embodied by its unique unicameral legislature, a nonpartisan governing body modeled after the British Parliament.
“When the bill came up for debate, I began offering many amendments and motions,” said Chambers. “I also added the caveat that other bills would suffer if this one moved.” In the end, Chambers, a master filibusterer on par with Mitch McConnell in the Senate, held the bill one vote shy of moving forward to a final vote. Republicans abandoned the measure, and the single and perhaps decisive electoral vote passing to Biden is the result, four years later.
“He stands up when there are inequities in the legislature,” said state Sen. Tony Vargas, who was re-elected for a second term representing Omaha’s south district and described Chambers as an “unsung hero of the integrity of the Nebraska legislature.” Hammel echoed these comments when he told me Chambers’s greatest accomplishment as a state senator was passing district voting in a different context. “Before Chambers, all the city council members in Omaha were elected at-large and, with a white majority, they were all white.” The same was true for the school board and county board. Chambers changed all this and “now you have diversity in representation.”
A gifted orator some have likened to a “firebrand preacher,” Chambers used his time in extended debates to educate his mostly white colleagues.
Sharp-tongued, unapologetic, and bullish for justice, Chambers, who is Black, was a stand-alone figure in Nebraska’s overwhelmingly white and conservative legislature. “Unlike a lot of legislators, he would slash and burn,” said Hammel. “He didn’t care who he upset or who he alienated.” A polarizing figure, supporters admired Chambers for his unflagging embrace of the downtrodden, and detractors loathed him for his obstructionist prowess. From the podium, Chambers was known to quote Popeye: “I am what I am.”
Though first elected to office in 1970, Chambers emerged as a community leader amid racial uprisings in Omaha in the 1960s, as civil rights leaders around the nation agitated for equal rights. Then a young barber, Chambers was nevertheless instrumental in negotiating a peace deal between Black youth, police, and the Omaha City Council, which was crucial to his political beginnings. At the end of May, not long after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, a clip of Chambers the barber taken from the award-winning documentary A Time for Burning went viral, amid national protests against police brutality.
Though Chambers is deserving of national attention, he’s most often received it for publicity stunts and radical statements like “My ISIS is the police.” But, on the legislative floor, he is a skilled tactician with a strong command of legislative rules. “He was so good with the rules he could tie up somebody’s bill and force them to make a deal,” Hammel told me.
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Ever in the minority, Chambers become highly skilled in the filibuster, deploying delay tactics such as extending debate. “He fully understands one individual could really slow down and hinder movement in a state like ours,” said Sen. Vargas. “He doesn’t do it all the time, but he does do it when he believes the integrity of our state and our people might be harmed.” A gifted orator some have likened to a “firebrand preacher,” Chambers used his time in extended debates to educate his mostly white colleagues on history, highlighting slavery and long-standing injustices to the Black community. Extremely well read, Chambers would quote at length from the Bible, which he, tongue in cheek, called “the Bibble.”
Chambers didn’t just play defense, however. In fact, he was often on the offensive.
A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, Chambers introduced a bill to repeal Nebraska’s capital-punishment law at the beginning of each legislative session. Chambers introduced this bill 36 times. It passed in 1976, only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Charles Thone. It passed again in 2015 with enough support from conservative senators to surpass a veto by current Gov. Pete Ricketts. This might have been Chambers’s crowning achievement, but, not long after, 60 percent of Nebraskans voted to reinstate the death penalty, after a petition earned enough signatures to be included on the ballot for the 2016 election. Chambers was successful in banning the death penalty for people under 18 at the time of their crimes and people with developmental disabilities.
In a presidential election some have framed as a moral referendum on the American soul, Chambers’s clear-eyed vision of justice is a helpful thorn to keep agitating.
While in office, Chambers also wrote laws that banned corporal punishment in Nebraska schools, eliminated sales tax on grocers, and held the state more accountable in a variety of ways, from requiring grand jury investigations of people who died in the custody of law enforcement to demanding investigations into campaign finance violations and use of legislative computers for cyber sex.
Chambers was such a thorn in the side of Nebraska’s conservative political leadership that they passed a term limit law to get him out of the legislature. Chambers served his term, waited four years, and then returned. His second term limit–required break came this year, and at age 83, it could be the last.
Chambers’s moral conscience and gritty perseverance guided his life, in and out of politics. “I know I’m the most feared and most hated man in this state,” Chambers told the Omaha World-Herald. “I know that and it doesn’t mean anything to me because my life is not based on whether people approve of what I do or agree with what I do.”
Regardless of Nebraska’s potentially crucial role in Biden’s victory, the tireless Chambers remains sober in his assessment of his state and the state of progressive politics in this country. “There’s a thick cloud of backwardness hanging around the entire state,” Chambers told me. “In my view, the only time you can say an area is progressive is not when they talk about [change], but when substantive changes are made that attack the root causes of the racism that is endemic in this country.” In a presidential election some have framed as a moral referendum on the American soul, Chambers’s clear-eyed vision of justice is a helpful thorn to keep agitating. Still, if Biden does carry Nevada and Arizona without winning Pennsylvania or Georgia, Chambers will have every right to look at Biden’s inauguration and take some credit for getting him into the Oval Office.
