Could Nebraska Cost Republicans the Senate?

A race that no one is talking about is threatening to upend Republicans’ high hopes to control the U.S. Senate after November’s election. Incumbent Deb Fischer, one of the 10 most unpopular senators in the country, according to Morning Consult’s July survey, is facing a stiff and unexpected challenge from an independent steamfitter named Dan Osborn, who is backed by the United Auto Workers and keeping his distance from the state’s beleaguered Democrats. While Osborn remains a long shot, he is likely to force Republicans to pour some money and resources into a race that they should have been able to win effortlessly as they try to capitalize on 2024’s GOP-friendly Senate map. And if Osborn wins, or even puts a credible scare into Fischer, his campaign could serve as a template for how to dislodge Republicans from statewide monopolies in places where Democrats have long struggled to compete.

Osborn, a Navy veteran who looks and sounds as if he were designed in a lab to reverse Democrats’ fortunes with non–college educated white voters, is running close to the incumbent in very limited polling of the race, most recently in a nonpartisan Split Ticket/SurveyUSA survey that gave Fischer just a 1-point lead.* An August YouGov survey sponsored by the Osborn campaign showed him within 2 points. And while candidate-sponsored polling can be unreliable, YouGov is an above-the-board operation that wouldn’t massage its numbers to please a client. Even more interesting was a July poll that the Osborn campaign commissioned through the Republican strategy firm Red Wave Strategies that showed a 42–42 tie. An April poll from Democratic-aligned Public Policy Polling also showed a tight race, with Fischer leading by 4, while the only internal poll from the Fischer campaign had her up … by 26.

There are other reasons to think Osborn is for real. The Fischer campaign refuses to debate him—a clear sign that she’s worried about what might happen if voters get a longer look at him. Last week he “debated” an empty chair at a Grand Island brewery while Fischer complained about how debates don’t leave the speakers enough time for any nuance. He’s almost gloriously unpolished and often sounds as if the idea to run for office occurred to him just that morning over coffee, and his policy positions are probably ideal for Nebraska: conservative on the border and the Second Amendment, liberal on abortion and organized labor. He has also made the unique decision not to accept endorsements from any elected politicians anywhere or money from corporate backers, stances that can’t hurt in a state where national attention from people who like to pour money into the Democratic consultant class’s latest race du jour would probably do more harm than good. He won’t even say which party he would caucus with in the Senate if he wins.

Independent candidates also have a decent track record in Senate elections when one of the two major parties gets out of the way. In 2022, for example, Utah Democrats sat out the fight against incumbent Republican and human outrage machine Mike Lee and saw independent Evan McMullin turn what was a 40-point landslide for Lee in 2016 into a relatively close 11-point contest. There are currently four independents in the Senate, although only two of them were elected as such: Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Angus King (Maine). Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin switched after they were elected as Democrats and aren’t running this year. Then there’s the fascinating case of Republican Lisa Murkowski, who keeps beating other Republicans in Alaskan general elections, most recently in 2022, since losing her 2010 primary. Independent Al Gross also cracked 40 percent in Alaska in 2020 in a losing campaign to incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan.

Osborn’s campaign spurned Nebraska Democrats in May, much to the dismay of the state party (which expected to back him), but almost certainly to the benefit of his chances. Democrats licked their wounds, then wisely decided not to run a write-in candidate, maximizing Osborn’s chances of pulling off a stunning upset—something that would be virtually impossible for someone with a D next to their name in Nebraska. Fischer, after all, won her 2018 race by almost 20 points in a strong, once-a-decade national environment for Democrats.

For Democrats, there may be bigger-picture implications here as well. With the party still facing a structural disadvantage in the Senate—the nonpartisan Cook Political Report gives 31 states a Republican lean and 19 states a Democratic lean—they can’t continue counting on GOP primary voters nominating knuckleheads in one winnable race after another forever. Terrible candidates have cost Republicans a seemingly never-ending series of competitive races over the past decade, including Blake Masters in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia in 2022. The problem has become so acute that Democrats have made a cottage industry out of boosting loopy extremists in GOP primaries. But at some point you have to assume that Republican Party elites will figure out a way to avoid relying on the most toxic figures in MAGAstan, for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else. If so, Democrats will need, somehow, to make breakthroughs in at least a couple of GOP firewall states if they want to have a significant chance to control the Senate in the long run.

It sounds counterintuitive, but effectively abandoning “the Democratic Party” in certain statewide races therefore isn’t the worst idea for someone trying to break the GOP’s monopoly in Republican strongholds. Ditching the two parties is a hard sell for most office seekers because individual candidates have strong incentives to be loyal party soldiers—that’s how you get to be a delegate to the DNC or win the funding and publicity from the party in state legislative elections. Even in states where Democrats have been the Washington Generals for generations, there are still opportunities to make a career in party politics if you don’t mind playing for the losing team forever.

But Nebraska is a better target for a hands-off approach than you might think. The Cornhusker State is the only one with a nonpartisan Legislature by statute, giving the independent label there more power than it might have in, say, Alabama. Democrats and independents outnumber the state’s self-identified Republicans, according to Pew’s most recent research. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Nebraska since former Sen. Ben Nelson in 2006, and the state remains deeply uncompetitive in presidential elections. (Barack Obama’s 41.2 percent in 2008 was the post-1964 high-water mark for Democratic candidates.) There are states like Georgia, where demographic trends and patterns of internal migration have made Democrats more competitive than they were 20 years ago, and Nebraska is very much not one of them. A different strategy is more than warranted unless they want to embody the idea memorably popularized by The Simpsons: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”

Still, there is one very, very good reason to be skeptical of Osborn’s odds: The past few electoral cycles have featured seemingly competitive Senate races in landslide states that ultimately reverted close to their partisan baselines on Election Day. In 2022 an internal August poll for Democrat Thomas McDermott showed him within 3 points of GOP nominee Todd Young for a Senate seat in Indiana. Young won by more than 20 points. More disappointingly, former Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan was leading some polls in his Ohio Senate race against future cat-lady antagonist J.D. Vance even into October 2022, only to lose by more than 6 points. This a pattern that goes back to the Obama era, with only a handful of successful candidates (typically incumbents like Maine’s Susan Collins and Montana’s Jon Tester) able to buck their own state’s partisan lean.

To actually pull this off, Osborn probably needs a much worse national environment for Republicans than the break-even one he’s facing. And ultimately, an independent’s doing better in defeat than Democrats usually do in Nebraska might feel like a hollow victory. But if Osborn can point the way to some semblance of competitiveness in deep-red federal races, he will have accomplished more than most Nebraska Democrats could ever have hoped for.