By GRANT SCHULTE

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska will never be mistaken for a swing state given that it hasn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, but if the race is close this fall, the state could have a key role in choosing the next president.

It’s all thanks to a law approved decades ago that was intended to attract presidential candidates to a state they usually ignore because it’s so reliably conservative. While the statewide vote will clearly go to President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden has a good chance of winning in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, meaning one of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes could go to the Democrat.

But there’s a problem with that scenario: Maine.

Maine is the only other state that awards Electoral College votes by congressional district, and it could go the opposite way and award a vote to Donald Trump even as the state as a whole likely will go to Biden.

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Shirl Mora James, a leader in the Nebraska Democratic Party, said with a sigh. “I’ve been working the phones in Pennsylvania. Maybe I need to be making calls in Maine.”

Although Nebraska and Maine take the same approach to awarding Electoral College votes — two votes for the overall winner plus votes for the winner of each congressional district — they had different motivations for their laws.

In Maine, legislators approved the new approach in 1969 in hopes of better representing voters who might be on the losing end of the statewide count but were still a substantial minority.

Nebraska arrived at the same system more than 20 years later, but lawmakers focused more on gaining the attention of presidential candidates. A Democratic legislator, DiAnna Schimek, recalled Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy’s 11-city whistle stop campaign across the state in 1968 and convinced enough Republicans that by changing the Electoral College system, the state could return to relevance.

“That was when Nebraska mattered,” Schimek reminisced recently.

Or as longtime Democratic activist Patricia Zieg put it, without Nebraska’s current system, “We’d just be a warm North Dakota.”

While they share the distinction of potentially going against their statewide votes, the Maine and Nebraska districts are decidedly different.

Maine’s sprawling 2nd District is among the nation’s largest and most rural, made up of small farms, coastal communities and vast stretches of forest. It’s nothing like Nebraska’s tightly packed 2nd District, which stretches from Omaha’s century-old urban neighborhoods and trendy downtown lofts through suburban developments and finally ends about 20 miles west in hobby farms and cornfields. The Nebraska district also dips south to older suburbs near Offutt Air Force Base.

The differences help explain why the two districts could favor opposing candidates.

A big reason for Biden’s strength in polls is his support among urban and suburban voters. Polling indicates Biden has a slight lead in the Nebraska district despite trailing badly statewide.

In Maine, the more urban 1st District, anchored by liberal Portland, is strongly Democratic, but the 2nd District is far more favorable to Trump. Polls have shown Biden and Trump in a tight race there.

In 2016, Trump managed to collect a single electoral vote in the 2nd District while Democrat Hillary Clinton took the state’s other three.

During this election cycle, Trump visited Maine in June to talk to fishermen and visit a factory that makes swabs critical to COVID-19 testing. Both of his sons have paid visits to Maine, too, along with Vice President Mike Pence, who paid a visit on Monday.

“It’s on, Maine. And the road to victory runs right through northern Maine,” Pence told a gathering in Hermon, in the 2nd District.

Nebraska Republicans were embarrassed when Democrat Barack Obama won the 2nd District’s electoral vote in 2008 and changed the district’s boundaries in 2011 to siphon off Democratic votes and avoid a repeat.

The state GOP also has called for the return of a traditional winner-take-all Electoral College system. But until then, Theresa Thibodeau, chairwoman of the Douglas County Republican Party, said she has used that vote for Obama as motivation for her follow Republicans.

“I think it was an eye-opener for a lot of people,” Thibodeau said. “Quite honestly, I think a lot of Republican voters stayed home because they thought Nebraska would stay red.”

Fred Conley, a former Democratic city councilman who is running for the Nebraska Legislature, said it’s clear that the competitive race in the district has generated more excitement and organizing by party activists.

And that, Schimek said, is why she pushed for the change so many years ago.

“I wanted to give people a feeling that their vote really counted,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers David Sharp in Portland, Maine, and Margery A. Beck in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.

___

Follow Grant Schulte on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrantSchulte

By JONATHAN LEMIRE, BILL BARROW and STEVE PEOPLES

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are set to square off in their final debate Thursday, one of the last high-profile opportunities for the trailing incumbent to change the trajectory of an increasingly contentious campaign.

Worried about losing the White House, some advisers are urging Trump to trade his aggressive demeanor from the first debate for a lower-key style that puts Biden more squarely in the spotlight. But it’s unclear whether the president will listen.

Biden, who has stepped off the campaign trail in favor of debate prep, expects Trump to get intensely personal. The former vice president and his inner circle see the president’s approach chiefly as an effort to distract from the coronavirus, its economic fallout and other crises.

With less than two weeks until Election Day, Biden is leading most national polls and has a narrower advantage in the battleground states that could decide the race. More than 42 million people have already cast their ballots. The debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, is a final chance for both men to make their case to a television audience of tens of millions of voters.

“The rule is that last debates before the election have a big impact,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who made clear the legacy of the candidates’ first faceoff: “That was the most out-of-control presidential debate we have seen.”

Biden told reporters Thursday in Delaware before his afternoon flight to Nashville that he had undergone testing for COVID-19 and the test came back negative. The White House was asked whether the president had been tested but had not released an update.

Trump announced on Oct. 1 he had tested positive, and spent three nights in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center before returning to the White House. Last week, during a town hall-style interview on MSNBC, Trump did not specify, when he was asked, when he had last been tested before the Sept. 29 first debate.

Trump, who staged a remarkable comeback in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, believes he can do it again by using the power of the presidency to attack his rival.

Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to immediately launch an investigation into unverified claims about Biden and his son Hunter, effectively demanding that the Justice Department muddy his political opponent and abandon its historic resistance to getting involved in elections.

Biden could also expect questions about his comments in a CBS interview, released Thursday, in which he wouldn’t rule out adding justices to the Supreme Court. The issue has followed him since the Sept. 18 death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the GOP-controlled Senate’s move to confirm Trump’s nominee to succeed her, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

During the interview for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Biden didn’t rule out studying the addition of members to the Supreme Court as part of a commission he plans to name to look at court reforms if he’s elected. He said the commission’s charge would “go well beyond packing.”

Trump, for his part, has been focusing on Biden’s family. He is promoting an unconfirmed New York Post report published last week that cites an email in which an official from Ukrainian gas company Burisma thanked Hunter Biden, who served on the company’s board, for arranging for him to meet Joe Biden during a 2015 visit to Washington. The Biden campaign has rejected Trump’s assertion of wrongdoing and noted that Biden’s schedule did not show a meeting with the Burisma official.

Trump’s attacks on the Biden family have been relentless, including his efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, which led to Trump’s impeachment. It’s part of a determined, yet so-far-unsuccessful effort to drive up his opponent’s negatives, as he did with Hillary Clinton four years ago.

While Biden will defend his own record and his son, aides have said, he hopes to focus on making the case that Trump is unfit for office and let the nation down during a confluence of crises.

“He knows that people want to hear about how we’re going to help working families get through the end of the month and pay the rent,” his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, said Wednesday in North Carolina. “That’s what people care about, and one of the things I love about Joe Biden — he doesn’t take on or talk about other people’s kids.”

The one-two punch of the first presidential debate and Trump’s the president’s three-day hospital stint after contracting COVID-19 rattled his base of support and triggered alarm among Republicans who fear the White House and Senate could be slipping away.

The initial debate’s belligerent tone was somehow fitting for what has been an extraordinarily ugly campaign. Amid heated clashes over the pandemic, the Supreme Court and the integrity of the election itself, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who have supported him, telling one such group known as the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

The two men frequently talked over each other with Trump interrupting, nearly shouting, so often that Biden eventually snapped at him, “Will you shut up, man?”

Aides have urged Trump, who has skipped debate prep, to show some restraint this time, allowing Biden to speak more and get himself in trouble with verbal gaffes and lapses. But the president has made no promises.

“Some people think, ‘Let him talk,’ because he loses his train (of thought), he just loses it and he doesn’t speak the train of thought,” Trump said in a town hall discussion taped at the White House Rose Garden and aired by Sinclair Broadcast Group on Wednesday evening. “But we’ll see what happens. I mean, you will have to be there.”

After Trump’s diagnosis, the Commission on Presidential Debates ruled that the second debate, which was to have been held last week, be virtual. Trump balked, leading to the cancellation of the debate and the two men holding dueling town halls instead, speaking at the same time more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) apart.

On Thursday night, in an effort to curtail interruptions, Trump and Biden will each have his microphone cut off while his rival delivers an opening two-minute answer to each of the six debate topics, the commission announced. The mute button won’t figure in the open discussion portion of the debate, but has drawn criticism from Trump.

“The mute is very unfair,” he said Wednesday as he left the White House for a campaign rally.

___

Lemire reported from Washington. Barrow reported from Atlanta. Additional reporting by Alexandra Jaffe and Zeke Miller in Washington and Aamer Madhani in Chicago.