Senate Republicans can breathe a sigh of relief: Nebraska’s Deb Fischer fended off her toughest challenger yet, beating independent candidate Dan Osborn.
It was a tight race until the end, as polls indicated. The AP called Fischer’s win at 12:06 a.m.
October polls found Fischer within a point of Osborn, forcing Republicans to invest in the state. The official campaign arm for Senate Republicans invested $1.4 million in the race, National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Philip Letsou told NOTUS. That’s significantly more than the NRSC invested in Fischer’s previous contests — per OpenSecrets, they put just under $12,000 into her 2012 run and no money into her 2018 run.
The NRSC was confident Fischer would shore up enough support to hang onto her seat.
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“Deb Fischer has built a steadily growing lead as Nebraskans learn more and more about her opponent, Democrat Dan Osborn, a Donald Trump-hating socialist,” Letsou said in a statement ahead of the election. “Fischer will crush Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked puppet.”
Fischer’s win was first and foremost a sign of “the strength of the Republican Party in Nebraska,” Randall Adkins, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, said. Fischer essentially didn’t run a real campaign until September, Adkins said, because they didn’t expect the race to be as competitive as it was.
Nebraska has more than 600,000 Republicans registered to vote, which is more than the state’s Democratic and nonpartisan registered voters combined. The state has a Republican governor, GOP-controlled state legislature and an entirely Republican delegation to Congress. Republicans have held at least one Senate seat in Nebraska since 1997 and controlled both seats since 2013, when Fischer was first elected.
Ultimately, the GOP’s last-ditch efforts prevailed, with the party infrastructure and her advantage as an incumbent playing in her favor.
John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said the union’s PAC endorsed Fischer because of her support for agricultural market reforms, biofuel production, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and similar issues.
“He’s been a labor leader. He’s not been a farmer,” Hansen said of Osborn. “We had more track record by far with Fischer.”
Still, Hansen, a sixth-generation homesteader in Nebraska who has led the farmers union for almost 36 years, said “Osborn has raised the bar” in a way he hasn’t seen before in the state — and seemingly opened the door to something other than total Republican control.
“The support in Nebraska for an independent candidate is … kind of a throwback to the more independent nature that Nebraskans have historically had that seems to have sort of waned in recent years,” Hansen said. “Osborn has kind of struck that nerve that I wasn’t sure still was alive.”
Osborn, a former labor union leader, campaigned on ending the “two-party doom loop,” and painted himself as a “blue-collar guy who works for a living.” He staked out policy positions against restrictions on both abortion and gun rights, in an attempt to appeal to those on both sides of the aisle.
Osborn spurned an endorsement from the state Democratic party in May, but he did have a friendly, albeit loose, relationship with the party. He fundraised through ActBlue, the platform traditionally used to support Democratic candidates, and commissioned polls from groups that have worked with Democratic candidates in the past.
Republicans said his ability to run up the numbers was a flash in the pan. But Democrats in the state took it as anything but that.
“The most important lesson that we’ve learned over the past couple election cycles is that voters are tired of the cookie-cutter candidate,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said. “The biggest lesson for Democrats is we have to start running our base, you know? Our base wants to see themselves on the ballot.”
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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