Back in 2011, Democrats were up in arms about a proposal being floated by Republicans in the Pennsylvania Legislature that would have split the state’s Electoral College votes in presidential elections. The plan would have divided the vote by congressional district rather than having them determined on a winner-take-all statewide basis. This scheme was widely denounced by liberals as nothing less than the moral equivalent of the 2000 Florida recount that some Democrats still falsely claim was stolen from Al Gore. Today, Nebraska is considering doing the opposite: changing to a winner-take-all used by 48 of the states and scrapping the existing law which would divvy up their votes the way the Pennsylvania GOP wanted to do. What did liberals think about that? They are defending the existing law to the last ditch as a sympathetic article in the New York Times reported over the weekend.

Currently Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that divide their Electoral College votes by congressional district. This is not a theoretical construct since, as the New York Times noted, Barack Obama won one Electoral College vote in deep-red Nebraska in 2008 because he won a majority in a district that encompasses Omaha. However, Republicans in the legislature want to put an end to any possibility of a repeat performance by Hillary Clinton. Democrats think this wrong and believe, as their state chairman said, that Republicans are trying to “deny our constituents of the right to be relevant in a national election.”

He’s right about that, but the same could have been said of members of his party four years ago when they screamed bloody murder over the GOP plan to give voters in the many districts where Republicans are the majority that same right to relevance. Of course, if that were to happen, Republicans would be given more than a single or even a few stray votes but would, in all likelihood win the majority of Pennsylvania’s 20 votes. The Huffington Post recalled the Pennsylvania Republican scheme shortly after Barack Obama’s reelection and gamed out the results if, as they called it, the “Republican Vote-Rigging Plan” were implemented with Romney getting a 273-262 win rather than Obama prevailing by 332-206.

Because Democrats often tend to be concentrated in cities and districts where they win by lopsided margins rather than being evenly distributed around the country, the GOP has a natural advantage in the competition for control of the House of Representatives. Liberals claim this is purely the product of gerrymandering, but it is more the result of the Voting Rights Act requiring the creation of majority-minority districts that herd Democrats into a few constituencies rather than spreading them out.

Thus, while letting each district have its say sounds good, it might increase the chances that the loser of the popular vote would win the Electoral College, and that is something no one in either party should want to see happen again.

Thus, national Democrats should be weighing in to support Nebraska Republicans, lest their silence be considered tacit support for a reversal of the law in other states where it would do their party far more damage than the potential loss of a single vote. But, as you may well expect, the silence from Democrats, especially the same liberal organs that waxed hysterical about the Pennsylvania scheme, is deafening. Even worse, as some of the quotes in the Times piece illustrate, the party is giving tacit support to efforts to preserve the status quo in Nebraska. Indeed, if the 2016 election turns out to be close, they’ll be fighting hard to steal that single Cornhusker vote that was merely the icing on Obama’s cake in 2008.

Pennsylvania Republicans have wisely not sought to revive what turned out to be a destructive and futile debate in 2011. But their counterparts in Nebraska should not be intimidated into giving up their efforts to join the other 48 winner-take-all states by liberals claiming they are being unfair. If Democrats aren’t going to put principle over partisan interest, there’s no reason for them to do so either.