One electoral vote might not sound like much. But it could mean the difference between freedom and renewal under Donald Trump, or further decline and tyranny under Joe Biden.  Thankfully, Republicans have finally woken up to this reality.

Turning Point USA is holding a “Win Every Vote” rally in Nebraska on Tuesday evening, to get the state to change the way it counts electoral votes. This isn’t just a regular political rally, however. It’s leading the vanguard of a complete seachange in Republican political strategy. Nebraska politicians are responding to grassroots pressure, and aiming to make structurally advantageous election reforms. In other words, they’re following the playbook of Democrats’ legal savant Marc Elias.

Fully legal, structural changes to election law are Democrats’ bread and butter. It’s precisely what got them into the White House in 2020, and Elias waged legal battles before and after the election. He was pivotal in securing schemes like extended absentee ballot deadlines and mail-in voting in key swing states across the country. After the election, he led the charge heading off challenges from the Trump campaign, often getting them thrown out on procedural grounds. All told, he won 64 out of 65 post-election cases.  This is what Republicans are up against.

Forty-eight states follow a winner-take-all approach to the Electoral College, with the entirety of a state’s votes going to one candidate. Since 1991, Nebraska (along with Maine) has done things differently, allocating electoral votes by district. Nebraska awards two votes to the statewide popular vote winner, and one additional vote for each of the three congressional districts in the state — a total of five. Despite being a sea of red, the state’s Omaha-centered 2nd district swung blue in 2020.

This one additional vote didn’t make a difference in the last election, but it could this year. Trump is currently up in swing states, but all could easily still go either way. He could win back Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — all states he lost in 2020 — and all else equal, still come in one vote shy of victory. Several configurations like this are possible. The single extra vote from a winner-take-all Nebraska would bring him over the 270-vote threshold.

Under Ronna McDaniel’s leadership, the RNC was reportedly indifferent to Nebraska’s unique electoral vote structure. Six months ago, Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood sought help from McDaniel to bring Nebraska back to the winner-take-all model.

“In essence, the response was: I’m a federal officer, this is a state issue,” Underwood told Semafor last week. “Thanks for the heads up, tell us how it goes.”

With an RNC complacently willing to let history repeat itself, the plan went nowhere.

However, with McDaniel gone, that all changed last week. Tyler Bowyer, an executive from Turning Point and RNC committeeman from Arizona, reached out to Underwood on Tuesday, inquiring whether the winner-take-all proposal could still be revived in the state legislature. Within 36 hours, the ball was once again rolling.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, Sen. Pete Ricketts, and most of the Republican supermajority in the state Senate endorsed the legislation, Semafor reported. Unsurprisingly, Trump voiced his support as well on Truth Social. The winner-take-all language was frantically amended to a bill already heading to the floor Wednesday, but for that reason, was shot down mostly on procedural grounds. With the state’s legislative session wrapping up April 18, there is little time left to re-introduce a stand-alone bill.

However, hope is not lost — at least according to Underwood. “There are constitutional, by-the-rules ways of making this happen, including how to amend it into another bill, to call a special session, to do a suspension of the rules,” he said.

“They have options,” he concluded.

Tonight’s “Win the Vote” rally is a way of keeping up the pressure. Charlie Kirk will be coming into the state to keep momentum with lawmakers while building support from the public. It’s a bold move, and shakes up the past consensus of propriety when Republicans would rather lose gracefully than engage in a political knife fight. The Democrats are predictably shrieking how potentially “rewrit[ing] the rules right before the election” poses a “threat to our democracy.” But of course, they’re simply afraid that Republicans are finally embracing the tactics they normalized in 2020.

While the effort might still fail, it’s a miracle that Republicans embraced such a movement at all. It shows Republicans are finally understanding what time it is, and are ready to move on from the failures of the past. The push in Nebraska still falls far short of what Elias was able to accomplish in 2020. But it’s a step in the right direction, an acknowledgment that the Old Guard’s complacency will never be enough to win. This must be the future of the Republican Party if the Republican Party is to have any future at all.