Great Plains - 2024 Election Compendium
Topic: 2024 Election Analysis
Great Plains 2024 Presidential Election Review
Author’s Note: All other election reviews can be found here.
This portion of the 2024 Election Compendium focuses on four states in a region I am referring to as the “Great Plains” – Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Outcomes
Kansas Trump +16.2%
Nebraska Trump +20.5%
· Nebraska’s 1st C.D. Trump +13.0%
· Nebraska’s 2nd C.D. Harris +3.6%
· Nebraska’s 3rd C.D. Trump +53.8%
North Dakota Trump +36.7%
South Dakota Trump +29.2%
Kansas Trump by minimum of 16.0%
Nebraska Trump by minimum of 20.0%
· Nebraska’s 1st C.D. Trump by minimum of 18.0%
· Nebraska’s 2nd C.D. Harris +2.0%
· Nebraska’s 3rd C.D. Trump by minimum of 55.0%
North Dakota Trump by minimum of 35.0%
South Dakota Trump by minimum of 28.0%
Preface
All four of these states are reliably Republican and haven’t backed a Democrat for president since they threw in with Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 national landslide. They comprise 17 electoral votes, which Trump won in 2016 in their entirety. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both took the single electoral vote allotted to Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (NE-2), which covers metro Omaha, by relatively small margins. Of note, Nebraska is one of two states (with Maine being the other) that splits electoral votes between congressional districts and allots two electors to the statewide popular vote winner.
These states are overwhelmingly agriculture-based, socially conservative, and not dominated by a metropolitan area, unlike Minnesota, which resembles all four geographically but has a political climate disparately impacted and driven by the Twin Cities metro area. None of the statewide races here were difficult to project, and in fact, I hit the margins in all with stunning accuracy (0.2% low in Kansas, 0.5% low in Nebraska, 1.7% low in North Dakota, and 1.2% low in South Dakota), and I had NE-2 leaned toward Biden, and then Harris, for the entirety of the cycle, and eventually settled on a Harris +2% call that was 1.6% light.
Three of these four states register voters by party, with North Dakota (which doesn’t register voters at all) being the lone exception. They all shifted Republican by registration from four years ago:
· Kansas from R+18.7% in 2020 to R+19.2% in 2024
· Nebraska from R+18.6% in 2020 to R+22.6% in 2024
· South Dakota from R+20.6% in 2020 to R+27.3% in 2024
Analysis
KANSAS
· The Sunflower State has the most counties of any state in the Great Plains with 105. Of those 105, 91 shifted toward the Republican Party by registration since the 2020 election. Most counties that shifted to the left by registration are overwhelmingly Republican Counties with nowhere to go but down as far as party registration index is concerned. There are some notable exceptions, such as Douglas and Johnson Counties. Only Douglas and Wyandotte Counties have Democrat registration advantages, but Johnson County will soon if voting trends persist.
· 72 of 105 counties followed their registration shifts with the same shift in results by percentage margin, meaning the party registration indicator was just 68.6% correct in predicting county trajectory by margin in Kansas; however, many of the swings left were in counties that are losing population and are overwhelmingly Republican, and 11 of the left swings in the state were by less than a point. See county results below, with the 8 largest voting counties broken out:
· Trump won Kansas by 13,866 more votes in margin than he did in 2020, or by an additional 1.5%. There were fewer ballots cast in the 2024 election than the 2020 election, suggesting Biden’s ballot count was too high four years ago, especially in Johnson County and Kansas’s college counties. Harris lagged Biden by 25,470 ballots, including slightly in Johnson County, although Trump also had fewer votes of his own statewide. She also lagged Biden by 5,364 ballots in Sedgwick County, which contains metro Wichita. Kansas’s rural counties are maxed out in their level of Republican support collectively, though some of Trump’s biggest gains by percentage margin were in heavily Hispanic counties in southwestern Kansas.
· Johnson County, the state’s largest county, had voted for every GOP presidential nominee from 1920 through 2016 before being won by Joe Biden in 2020, and held by Harris by a margin just slightly left of Biden’s. Aside from Wyandotte and Shawnee Counties around metro Kansas City, and two college counties (Riley and Douglas), Democrats have little to pin statewide hopes on without major expansion of Johnson County and its ability to produce greater Democrat margins.
NEBRASKA
· 92 of 93 counties in Nebraska became more Republican (or less Democrat, in the cases of Douglas and Thurston Counties) by party registration since 2020. Blaine County is the only exception, and at R+81.8% in 2020, it would be nearly impossible to expand such an advantage, especially after four consecutive decades of depopulation.
· 79 out of 93 counties (84.9%) became more Republican by percentage margin in the results, meaning the party registration index went 80 for 93 (86.0%) in predicting county trajectory by margin shift. Harris won only Douglas and Lancaster (metro Lincoln) Counties while lagging Biden by 4,588 ballots statewide. The party registration index was accurate in the three largest counties, and suggests rural Nebraska is maxed out in its margin of GOP support:
· Douglas (all), Saunders (all), and Sarpy (partial) Counties make up NE-2. They shifted by registration as follows:
Douglas County from D+3.1% to D+1.2%
Saunders County from R+37.2% to R+46.1%
Sarpy County from R+17.1% to R+18.5%
· Nebraska has had its split electoral vote system since 1992. Every Republican won all its electoral votes from then through 2004, and then NE-2 was won by Barack Obama in 2008 before all electoral votes returned to the GOP nominees in 2012 and 2016. NE-2 now includes all of Douglas and Saunders Counties, and only the western portion of Sarpy County. The most recent redrawing of the district drew in Saunders County but did not cut deeply enough into Nebraska’s deeply Republican outlying counties to produce a reliable GOP electoral vote out of the district. Here is how NE-2, regardless of its boundaries, has shifted since 2004:
· With its new boundaries, this is how the margins shook out in NE-2 by county:
· Democrat nominees have added 34,935 net ballots in Douglas County in two elections since 2016, when Clinton lost NE-2 to Trump by 2.4% (factoring in Harris’s slight decrease from Biden’s count). It took from 2000 through 2016 in the county to add that many net ballots to the Democrat count previously, which represents an astonishing rate of growth that was marked as highly suspicious in my evaluation of the 2020 election. Likewise, Democrat growth in Sarpy County has clocked in at +15,792 ballots in two cycles net, a gain which previously took 20 years to make on the front end (1996 through 2016) – despite Trump’s gains in both 2020 and 2024 being larger than his own in 2016, when he won the county by more votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
· Local elections watchdog Elliott Bottorf has uncovered several examples of maladministration and ballot stuffing in the state (not limited to NE-2), and while issues persist, it cannot be shown in this year’s numbers that the NE-2 results are highly disparate, particularly since Trump improved in the district by over two points.
NORTH DAKOTA
· Harris was utterly decimated in North Dakota, where she suffered the worst defeat in a presidential election since Dwight Eisenhower thumped Adlai Stevenson by 42.6% in 1952. She carried just two counties, the majority Native American Rolette and Sioux Counties, on the way to dropping the state’s three electoral votes. 46 of 53 (86.8%) counties shifted toward Trump in results by percentage margin from four years ago, and in the 7 that didn’t, Trump had at least 73.9% of the county’s vote share, meaning depopulation and being maxed out caused the shifts, not an organic regional trend.
· North Dakota is the only state that doesn’t register voters at all. I have been involved in disputes with some from North Dakota who cite other databases in which voter information can be used, but the fact remains that 49 states and Washington, D.C., have voter registration, and North Dakota doesn’t. North Dakota also has, according to my evaluation model, arguably the cleanest elections in America, with the Biden vs. Trump contest having fewer net new votes added to it than the Clinton vs. Trump contest did in 2016, despite an artificial turnout boom everywhere else in the country, including within the region. This means voter registration, especially when states shift to Automatic Voter Registration, is clearly the foundation of electoral fraud.
· Voters must show up in person and present a valid ID to receive a ballot in North Dakota. It sounds logical to me, but voter registration is such a commonly accepted way of running elections, there isn’t traction beyond North Dakota to implement this system nationwide. There is absentee voting, but it requires valid identification, and there are few substantial population centers to harvest them from anyway. Lack of a voter registration database makes it impossible for fraudsters to pair loose registrations with absentee requests, a practice found in more corrupt states.
· Harris lagged Biden by 2,575 ballots statewide, and while she nearly equaled his count from Cass County, which contains metro Fargo, Trump gained 5.7% in margin of victory there from 2020. The county is the largest in the state and accounted for nearly one-quarter of presidential ballots this cycle (24.7%).
SOUTH DAKOTA
· Like neighboring Iowa, South Dakota is undergoing a vast and dramatic realignment of its voter registration partisan affiliation, despite the state having already produced large GOP margins for two decades that are nearly maxed out. All 66 counties in South Dakota shifted Republican by registration index since 2020, moving the state from R+20.6% to R+27.3%:
· 56 of 66 (84.8%) counties followed the party registration indicator to the right, including the most significant counties (politically speaking), Minnehaha (metro Sioux Falls) and Pennington (metro Rapid City). 6 of 10 counties shifting to the left shifted by 1.0% or less, and Trump had no less than 69.9% of the vote share in any of them, suggesting they nudged left due to depopulation and being maxed out, not due to a legitimate leftward trend.
· The registration index was highly predictive for larger counties, and forecasted the rightward shift of the smaller counties collectively:
· Trump flipped three-quarters Native American Ziebach County, which he also won in 2016.
· Harris lagged Biden by 3,612 ballots statewide and failed to reach his exorbitantly high ballot count in Minnehaha or Pennington Counties from 2020, albeit narrowly. South Dakota Canvassing Group, led by Jessica Pollema, has identified numerous discrepancies in the state’s voter roll that can lead to ballot stuffing, especially at RV parks and reservations, which are prevalent in the state. The group once had the support of Secretary of State Monae Johnson, who used them to get elected and then severed all ties once in a position to improve things with regard to voter trust in elections.
REGION
· The map above tells the story in the Great Plains. Harris dropped Biden ballots in 275 of 317 counties, and even lagged Clinton in 63 of those 275. She gained in 42 counties, with Sarpy County, Nebraska, reflecting her highest gain in the region (+2,619).
· With North Dakota excluded due to lack of voter registration, the party registration indicator went for 208 for 264 (78.8%) in accurately forecasting shift in results by percentage margin.
· These four states produced the following Trump margins in all three of his races:
Trump won the region by a margin 53,569 higher than he did in 2010, with a larger percentage margin victory in each; while Trump has larger margins of victory by raw vote in each of the Dakotas, he lags his 2016 margins in Kansas and Nebraska. This is due to the rural areas of the states being maxed out, and because Johnson County, Kansas, and the Omaha metro have undergone leftward shifts in each of the past two cycles, with enough investigative work conducted over the past four years to suggest that isn’t all organic. Minnehaha and Cass Counties in the Dakotas have shifted right.
Opportunities for Election Manipulation
Here is how these four states rank with regard to my most commonly assessed demerits.
· Voter ID – All four states require ID. Nebraska’s photo ID law went into effect this year; North Dakota requires ID, but not photo ID, which is the most secure form of voter ID requirement.
· Same Day Registration – None of these states permit same day voter registration.
· Ballot Harvesting – All four states have reasonable laws discouraging ballot harvesting, and none have excessive absentee or mail-in balloting. Furthermore, the lack of densely populated urban areas in the region makes this practice less enticing for those who wish to manipulate elections.
· Ranked Choice Voting – Not present in any of these states.
· Automatic Voter Registration – None of these states operate AVR.
The Pathway Ahead
None of these states hold bright statewide hopes for Democrat candidates, especially at the presidential level. They are far too socially conservative and rely far too heavily upon agriculture and energy production to change their stripes, and lack dominant urban areas to overwhelm the people of the land, as happens every election in Minnesota. The one electoral vote of the 17 on the table up for grabs is that allotted to NE-2. Republican Don Bacon, who is not highly regarded by most of the Trump base, holds that seat in the U.S. House, although he retained it by less than 2 points last month. A suburban-model Republican would probably pick up that electoral vote but would, by default, be a weaker candidate in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and put their 44 electoral votes at risk. Nebraska’s legislature, after concern of a 269-269 Electoral College tie came up late in the cycle, ultimately neglected to pass a bill making Nebraska’s electoral votes winner-take-all. I’m on the fence about how I feel about such a change, but if Maine’s legislature makes their electoral votes winner-take-all, then Nebraska must follow suit and discard any pretense of fairness.
The rural areas of these states are all but maxed out and may regress in raw vote margin for the next GOP presidential nominee without the star power of Trump. Any slight shifts in margin are tethered to the shifting of the major metros in the east of each state – Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Falls, and Fargo. Three of these states have their share of issues, which North Dakota’s lack of voter registration highlights, and efforts should be made in urban areas to prevent the pinking of the state legislatures – meaning manipulation of local races to create a weaker legislative majority more unlikely to pass good legislation. The NE-2 U.S. House seat may soon find itself going the way of KS-3 (Johnson County) if trends persist.
Final Grades and Closing Commentary
Harris lagging Biden in Johnson and Douglas Counties likely points to me being correct about their ballot counts being stuffed in 2020, but since this is a study relative to the shifts in the rest of the country in comparison to 2016 and 2020, there is no increase in level of potential manipulation in any of these states like there is in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan.
The Top 5 Election Integrity Targets in the Great Plains are (in no order):
· Johnson County, KS
· Douglas County, NE
· Sarpy County, NE
· Minnehaha County, SD
· Cass County, ND
Kansas receives a Grade of 1 – Lowest Concern – based on 2024 shifts and the presence of strong election laws, although Johnson County continues to be of significant concern.
Nebraska receives a Grade of 1 – Lowest Concern – based on 2024 shifts and the presence of strong election laws, although the NE-2 electoral vote appears to have absorbed its 2020 ballot count.
North Dakota receives a Grade of 1 – Lowest Concern – based on 2024 shifts and the presence of strong election laws, and in my opinion, runs the best and most secure elections in America even though they need some tweaks to their voter ID laws to enforce photo ID. Their no voter registration standard should be replicated nationwide.
South Dakota receives a Grade of 1 – Lowest Concern – based on 2024 shifts and the presence of strong election laws, although the voter rolls have been shown to contain fraudulent registrations belonging to voters who live out of state.
Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.