Nebraska Republicans are tired of the political establishment. That could spell trouble for the state’s Republican senator and the GOP’s ability to secure a significant Senate majority.
Sen. Deb Fischer, who’s seeking a third term, is shoring up support from the state GOP, prominent agriculture groups and others in her quest to hang onto her seat in a surprisingly competitive race. But she can’t seem to build up the same enthusiasm among the rightmost wing of her party, even as they eagerly head to the polls for former President Donald Trump.
Fischer leads independent candidate Dan Osborn in the polls by 1 percentage point, per a New York Times/Siena College poll at the end of October. Trump is doing much better in the state, leading Vice President Kamala Harris in the same poll by about 15 points.
One county Republican Party chair in Nebraska told NOTUS that many Republican voters he’s spoken with are undecided on who they will support in the Senate race. Those voters see Fischer, who has been a senator since 2013 and served in the Nebraska State Legislature for about eight years before that, as a lackluster candidate, he said.
“I don’t think it has to do much with policy, but just a general sentiment that has gone along with those in the quote, unquote establishment, and especially lately, that’s not been a very positive vibe,” the county chair said.
On the other hand, Trump can count on Republicans in Nebraska without any doubt, the chair added. He chalks up the difference in attitude to two factors: First, Trump isn’t viewed as part of the same “leadership that’s been there for a while” category that some Republicans have cast Fischer in, and second, Nebraska Republicans don’t have much information about why a Fischer win is necessary for Republicans to take back power in the Senate.
“Depending on how November goes, every vote in the Senate is going to count. … I don’t think the day-to-day voters really grasp that for whatever reason,” he said.
Those day-to-day voters who want to see new blood in their state’s congressional delegation are the subset of the electorate that could yield potential Trump-Osborn tickets, according to Randall Adkins, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
“I have heard a handful of Republicans who have said that they’re voting for Osborn, and they’re very much the Republicans who are sort of fed up with government overall,” Adkins told NOTUS. “You know, ‘I’m just tired of the whole system, and so I’m going to vote for somebody who is just outside of Washington,’ because they clearly identify Fischer as being a Washington insider now.”
Fischer endorsed Trump in January and Trump endorsed Fischer in September. But the mutual support hasn’t been enough to win over some Trump voters — even as Trump himself appeared in an ad for Fischer to dissuade Nebraskans from backing Osborn, calling the independent a “radical left person” and likening him to Bernie Sanders.
The Osborn campaign retaliated with its own ad that encourages ticket splitters, featuring four people who say they’re voting for Trump and Osborn. “Osborn is with Trump on China, the border and draining the swamp,” the ad says. In another recent ad, Osborn himself says that “if Trump needs help building the wall, I’m pretty handy.”
Osborn’s effort to highlight his overlap with Trump is new. Earlier in his Senate campaign, he told The New York Times that Trump and Joe Biden were both “incompetent” and he wouldn’t side with either in the presidential race.
Democrats have also helped Osborn’s candidacy while keeping some distance and, at times, awkwardly overstepping. After an outside Democratic group asserted in a text message to voters that Osborn would caucus with Democrats in the Senate, the Osborn campaign pushed back and the group ultimately said the text was “incorrect.”
Osborn has campaigned on a variety of policy positions, including traditionally Republican ones like preserving Second Amendment rights and securing the border.
It hasn’t gone over party leaders’ heads that Fischer has been at odds with Trump in the past, said Connie Baker, the chair of the Antelope County GOP.
Ahead of the 2016 election, the senator called on Trump to step aside as the Republican Party’s nominee after The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape. And in 2021, she didn’t join eight of her Republican colleagues in the Senate who voted to object to election results.
In Antelope County, where Trump won by more than 70 points in 2016 and 2020, Baker said most Republicans she knows will probably vote for Fischer — though begrudgingly.
“We don’t have a choice,” Baker told NOTUS. “People understand that we just have to hold our nose and vote for Deb Fischer.”
Yet Fischer’s campaign this cycle hasn’t made the same inroads with any group of voters that Trump’s campaign has. She’s trailing Trump overall and among core groups of voters in Nebraska, including men — where she has a 13-point advantage as compared to the former president’s 31-point advantage — and white voters, said Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, which conducts the New York Times/Siena College poll.
Simultaneously, Osborn is presumably gaining ground among at least some Republicans, successfully cutting into the GOP’s advantage in the state, Levy told NOTUS.
Osborn’s and Fischer’s campaigns didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Some Republicans in the party aren’t going in with the “hold our nose” attitude. Mike Helmink, a railroad worker and union member who’s part of Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety — a PAC backing Osborn — told NOTUS that he’s talked to several people who say they’ll split their ticket if it means there’s a possibility for change.
“After … the 2016 election, people would say, ‘I voted for Trump because Bernie [Sanders] wasn’t there,’ and I just didn’t know what to do with that, because they reflect two completely polar opposite opinions, right? But what it told me was they wanted change,” Helmink told NOTUS. “I think that is what we’re seeing in the Osborn race, that people have tried everything up to now, and they want something different.”
Many of these Osborn supporters are siding with Trump because the economy is the biggest issue to them, Helmink said. But Osborn is appealing as a working-class candidate who hasn’t been involved in politics before now.
If Osborn wins, it’ll be the first time since 1988 that the state will see that type of ticket split. That year, George H.W. Bush won the state with more than 60% of the vote, and Democrat Bob Kerrey won a Senate seat with more than 56% of the vote.
Parts of the state are prone to ticket splitting the opposite way — in 2020, voters in Nebraska’s blue-leaning 2nd Congressional District split the ticket to favor Biden in the presidential race while backing incumbent Republican Rep. Don Bacon for the House seat. The district, which has its own electoral college vote, is now central to Harris’ most likely path to victory.
But Levy warned that polling may not necessarily translate to election night outcomes. Voters who are leaning toward a ticket split now may change their minds if they’re influenced by Republicans’ last-ditch efforts to “hustle in there” on behalf of Fischer, he told NOTUS.
“At the eleventh hour, when people go in and cast their ballot, whether they start to consider the degree to which to vote for Osborn is in some manner, shape or form, a vote against Trump — that may indeed give them pause,” he said.
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.