A single blue dot has become a political symbol in the solid red state of Nebraska.
About a week ago, Omaha resident Jason Brown painted a large blue dot on a white yard sign and put it up in the front yard of his and his wife Ruth Huebner-Brown’s home. The somewhat mysterious sign soon caught the attention of his neighbors in the swing district. Now, signs with the blue dot, which symbolizes a quirk in Nebraska electoral politics, are taking over Nebraska’s largest city as voters hope to turn the district blue for Vice President Kamala Harris.
What exactly is this electoral quirk? Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that doesn’t award all its electoral votes in presidential elections as winner-take-all. Rather, Nebraska gives the statewide winner two votes and apportions the other votes by congressional district. That means voters in the more liberal Omaha area aren’t so much in a solidly “red” state as they are a potential “blue dot” inside that state. Should the election be tied, their one vote could determine the winner, and candidates like former President Barack Obama have campaigned there to win it.
Brown visualizes this distinction with his yard sign design—and his neighbors soon asked him to make them blue dot signs for their yards, too.
“The signs are truly conversation starters. The more of them there are the more conversations get started,” Grant Mussman, an Omaha man who is an administrator on the “Blue Dot Energy – Nebraskans for Harris-Walz” Facebook group, tells Fast Company. “We have been known as the blue dot since Obama,” he said, but adds that the yard sign idea “modernized it.”
The modernized concept also seems to have caused the signs to take off. Brown’s had so many requests, in fact, that he ran out of supplies after making 400 signs. He’s since ordered more materials to make an additional 1,600. The blue dot signs are now popping up in front of homes around town. Online, the Facebook group grows by about 1,000 members a day. One woman asked the group whether they’d ship signs to Florida.
Such an ambiguous symbol also means the signs can get around HOA regulations against yard signs with campaign logos. And luckily for Omaha Democrats who want a blue dot but can’t get their hands on one of Brown’s painted signs, they can always just make their own. One member of the Facebook group posted a photo of a blue dot window sign she said her nine-year-old made, and another said she left removable blue dot stickers for people to put on their mailboxes at a free little library in town.
Population density in the U.S. is closely correlated with political affiliation, meaning urban areas tend to be more liberal and rural areas tend to be more conservative. So while Democrats in Omaha might feel politically alone in their own state, voters in cities like Austin and Salt Lake feel their pain.
The resonance of the simple symbol speaks to how many Democratic-leaning voters feel in Republican-run states, but it’s taken hold in Nebraska because they can actually do something about it at the ballot box. Doing away with a winner-take-all method puts at least one electoral vote in Nebraska in play, and Mussman said many involved with blue dot signs “would like to see every state do it.”